Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Research Design: Experiments and Experimental Thinking 127
tion Study, men who smoked (that is, those who were subject to the intervention)
were about 12 times more likely than nonsmokers (the control group) to
die of lung cancer. At that time, relatively few women smoked, and those who
did had not been smoking very long. Their risk was just 2.7 times that for
women nonsmokers of dying from lung cancer.
By 1988, things had changed dramatically. Male smokers were then about
23 times more likely than nonsmokers to die of lung cancer, and female smokers
were 12.8 times more likely than female nonsmokers to die of lung cancer.
Men’s risk had doubled (from about 12 to about 23), but women’s risk had
more than quadrupled (from 2.7 to about 13) (National Cancer Institute 1997).
In the last decade, the death rate for lung cancer has continued to fall among
men in the United States, while the death rate for women has remained about
the same (http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics.htmstatistics) or even
risen (Patel et al. 2004).
In true experiments run with the posttest-only design, participants are
assigned at random to either the intervention or the control group. In the staticgroup
comparison design, the researcher has no control over assignment of
participants. This leaves the static-group comparison design open to an unresolvable
validity threat. There is no way to tell whether the two groups were
comparable at time 1, before the intervention, even with a comparison of
observations 1 and 3. Therefore, you can only guess whether the intervention
caused any differences in the groups at time 2.
Despite this, the static-group comparison design is the best one for evaluating
natural experiments, where you have no control over the assignment of
participants anyway.
Lambros Comitas and I wanted to find out if the experience abroad of Greek
labor migrants had any influence on men’s and women’s attitudes toward gender
roles when they returned to Greece. The best design would have been to
survey a group before they went abroad, then again while they were away, and
again when they returned to Greece. Since this was not possible, we studied
one group of persons who had been abroad and another group of persons who
had never left Greece. We treated these two groups as if they were part of a
static-group comparison design (Bernard and Comitas 1978).
From a series of life histories with migrants and nonmigrants, we learned
that the custom of giving dowry was under severe stress (Bernard and Ashton-
Vouyoucalos 1976). Our survey confirmed this: Those who had worked
abroad were far less enthusiastic about providing expensive dowries for their
daughters than were those who had never left Greece. We concluded that this
was in some measure due to the experiences of migrants in West Germany.
There were threats to the validity of this conclusion: Perhaps migrants were
a self-selected bunch of people who held the dowry and other traditional