Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Literature Search 107
Women Scale and turned up 50 references. I found another four references by
changing ‘‘toward’’ to ‘‘towards.’’ Now, ‘‘towards’’ was simply not the word
in the original name of the scale, but after more than 30 years of use, I was
betting that someone would have used that variant.
Some databases do have intelligent spell-checkers. A search for ‘‘behavior
measurement’’ and ‘‘behaviour measurement’’ in PsycINFO turned up the
same list of 142 references. But neither spelling captured the 230 references
that I got with ‘‘behavioral measurement’’ or the nine additional references
for ‘‘behavioural measurement.’’ I had a similar experience with ‘‘geographic
information systems’’ and ‘‘geographical information systems.’’ These quirks
in the search engines are simply there, so learn to search creatively.
3. Learn to narrow your searches. This just takes practice. That MEDLINE search
for (childhood diarrhea) OR (infantile diarrhea) and for (childhood diarrhoea)
OR (infantile diarrhoea) turned up a total of 3,786 articles. I narrowed the search
to (childhood diarrhea OR infantile diarrhea) AND (cultural factors), and that
returned 29 items. Changing ‘‘diarrhea’’ to ‘‘diarrhoea’’ in that search added 15
more items.
The words AND and OR in these searches are called Boolean operators.
The other operator is NOT. I asked MEDLINE for all articles since 1977 on
(regimen compliance AND malaria). That search brought back abstracts for
54 articles. When I restricted the search to [(regimen compliance AND
malaria) NOT Africa], I got back 37 abstracts. The parentheses and brackets
in Boolean searches work just like equations in algebra. So, that last search I
did fetched all the items that had ‘‘regimen compliance’’ and ‘‘malaria’’ in
their titles or abstract. Then, the items were sorted and any of those items that
contained the word ‘‘Africa’’ was dropped. The logic of Boolean operators is
used in database management—about which, lots more at the end of chapter
14 on field notes.
Meta-Analysis
Meta-analysis involves piling up all the quantitative studies ever done on a
particular topic to assess quantitatively what is known about the size of the
effect. The pioneering work on meta-analysis (M. L. Smith and Glass 1977)
addressed the question: Does psychotherapy make a difference? That is, do
people who get psychotherapy benefit, compared to people who have the same
problems and who don’t get psychotherapy? Since then, there have been thousands
of meta-analyses, but most of them are in fields like psychology and
medicine, where data from experiments lend themselves to direct comparison.