Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

240 Chapter 9
Hyman and Cobb (1975) found that female interviewers who took their cars
in for repairs themselves (as opposed to having their husbands do it) were
more likely to have female respondents who report getting their own cars
repaired. And Zehner (1970) found that when women in the United States
were asked by women interviewers about premarital sex, they were more
inhibited than if they were asked by men. Male respondents’ answers were not
affected by the gender of the interviewer.
By contrast, William Axinn (1991) found that women in Nepal were better
than men as interviewers. In the Tamang Family Research Project, the female
interviewers had significantly fewer ‘‘don’t know’’ responses than did the
male interviewers. Axinn supposes this might be because the survey dealt with
marital and fertility histories.
Robert Aunger (1992, 2004:145–162) studied three groups of people in the
Ituri forest of Zaire. The Lese and Budu are horticultural, while the Efe are
foragers. Aunger wanted to know if they shared the same food avoidances. He
and three assistants, two Lese men and one Budu man, interviewed a total of
65 people. Each of the respondents was interviewed twice and was asked the
same 140 questions about a list of foods.
Aunger identified two types of errors in his data: forgetting and mistakes. If
informants said in the first interview that they did not avoid a particular food
but said in the second interview that they did avoid the food, Aunger counted
the error as forgetfulness. If informants reported in interview two a different
type of avoidance for a food than they’d reported in interview one, then
Aunger counted this as a mistake.
Even with some missing data, Aunger had over 8,000 pairs of responses in
his data (65 pairs of interviews, each with up to 140 responses), so he was
able to look for the causes of discrepancies between interview one and interview
two. About 67% of the forgetfulness errors and about 79% of the mistake
errors were correlated with characteristics of informants (gender, ethnic group,
age, and so on).
However, about a quarter of the variability in what informants answered
to the same question at two different times was due to characteristics of the
interviewers (ethnic group, gender, native language, etc.).
And consider this: About 12% of variability in forgetting was explained by
interviewer experience. As the interviewers interviewed more and more informants,
the informants were less likely to report ‘‘no avoidance’’ on interview
one and some avoidance on interview two for a specific food. In other words,
interviewers got better and better with practice at drawing out informants on
their food avoidances.
Of the four interviewers, though, the two Lese and the Budu got much better,
while the anthropologist made very little progress. Was this because of