Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

140 Chapter 5
population density, so that the chance for interaction with strangers would be
about equal in each run of the experiment, and he used two independent
observer-recorders.
As Bochner points out, however, there were still design flaws that threatened
the internal validity of the experiment (1980:337). As it happens, the
interrater reliability of the two observers in this experiment was nearly perfect.
But suppose the two observers shared the same cultural expectations about
Aboriginal-white relations in urban Australia. They might have quite reliably
misrecorded the cues that they were observing.
Reactive and unobtrusive observations alike tell you what happened, not
why. It is tempting to conclude that the Aboriginal woman was ignored
because of active prejudice. But, says Bochner, ‘‘perhaps passersby ignored
the Aboriginal ...because they felt a personal approach might be misconstrued
as patronizing’’ (ibid.:338).
In Bochner’s third study, a young white or Aboriginal woman walked into
a butcher’s shop and asked for 10 cents’ worth of bones for her pet dog. The
dependent variables in the experiment were the weight and quality of the
bones. (An independent dog fancier rated the bones on a 3-point scale, without
knowing how the bones were obtained, or why.) Each woman visited seven
shops in a single middle-class shopping district.
In both amount and quality of bones received, the white woman did better
than the Aboriginal, but the differences were not statistically significant—the
sample was just too small so no conclusions could be drawn from that study
alone. Taken all together, though, the three studies done by Bochner and his
students comprise a powerful set of information about Aboriginal-white relations
in Sydney. Naturalistic experiments have their limitations, but they often
produce intuitively compelling results.
Are Field Experiments Ethical?
Field experiments come in a range of ethical varieties, from innocuous to
borderline to downright ugly. I see no ethical problems with the lost-letter
technique. When people mail one of the lost letters, they don’t know that they
are taking part in an experiment, but that doesn’t bother me. Personally, I see
no harm in the experiment to test whether people vent their anger by honking
their car horns more quickly at people they think are lower socioeconomic
class. These days, however, with road rage an increasing problem, I don’t recommend
repeating Doob and Gross’s experiment.
Randomized field experiments, used mostly in evaluation research, can be
problematic. Suppose you wanted to know whether fines or jail sentences are