Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

302 Chapter 11
(2002) found that you can increase recall with four kinds of probes: (1) redundant
questioning, (2) nonspecific prompting, (3) prompting with alphabetic
cues, and (4) prompting with semantic cues. Here’s the redundant question
that Brewer and his colleagues asked a group of IV-drug users:
Think of all the different kinds of drugs or substances people use to get high, feel
good, or think and feel differently. These drugs are sometimes called recreational
drugs or street drugs. Tell me the names of all the kinds of these drugs you can
remember. Please keep trying to recall if you think there are more kinds of drugs
you might be able to remember. (ibid.:347)
Notice how the question is repeated in different words and with a few cues
built in. In nonspecific prompting you ask people ‘‘What other kinds of X are
there?’’ after they’ve responded to your original question. You keep asking
this question until people say they can’t think of any more Xs.
With alphabetic cues, you go through the alphabet and ask informants
‘‘what kinds of X are there that begin with the letter A?’’ And in semantic
cues, you take the first item in an informant’s initial list and ask: ‘‘Think of
all the kinds of X that are like Y,’’ where Y is that first item on the list. ‘‘Try
to remember other types of X like Y and tell me any new ones that you haven’t
already said.’’ You do this for the second item, the third and so on. This technique
increases recall of items by over 40% (Brewer et al. 2002:112).
You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from a humble set of free
lists. Henley (1969) asked 21 adult Americans (students at Johns Hopkins
University) to name as many animals as they could in 10 minutes. She found
an enormous variety of expertise when it comes to naming animals. In just
this small group of informants (which didn’t even represent the population of
Johns Hopkins University, much less that of Baltimore or the United States),
the lists ranged in length from 21 to 110, with a median of 55.
In fact, those 21 people named 423 different animals, and 175 were mentioned
just once. The most popular animals for this group of informants were:
dog, lion, cat, horse, and tiger, all of which were named by more than 90% of
informants. Only 29 animals were listed by more than half the informants, but
90% of those were mammals. By contrast, among the 175 animals named only
once, just 27% were mammals.
But there’s more. Previous research had shown that the 12 most commonly
talked about animals in American speech are: bear, cat, cow, deer, dog, goat,
horse, lion, mouse, pig, rabbit, and sheep. There are n(n 1)/2, or 66 possible
unique pairs of 12 animals (dog-cat, dog-deer, horse-lion, mouse-pig, etc.).
Henley examined each informant’s list of animals, and found the difference
in the order of listing for each of the 66 pairs.