Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Structured Interviewing II: Cultural Domain Analysis 307
notion (1965) that cognitive models are based on shared assumptions, but that
ultimately they are best construed as properties of individuals.
Techniques like true-false and yes-no tests that generate nominal data are
easy to construct, especially with Anthropac, and can be administered to a
large number of informants. Frame elicitation in general, however, can be boring,
both to the informant and to the researcher alike. Imagine, for example, a
list of 25 animals (mice, dogs, antelopes . . .), and 25 attributes (ferocious,
edible, nocturnal . . .).
The structured interview that results from such a test involves a total of 625
(25 25) questions to which an informant must respond—questions like ‘‘Is
an antelope edible?’’ ‘‘Is a dog nocturnal?’’ ‘‘Is a mouse ferocious?’’ People
can get pretty exasperated with this kind of foolishness, so be careful to
choose domains, items, and attributes that make sense to people when you do
frame elicitations and true-false tests.
Triad Tests
In a triad test, you show people three things and tell them to ‘‘Choose the
one that doesn’t fit’’ or ‘‘Choose the two that seem to go together best,’’ or
‘‘Choose the two that are the same.’’ The ‘‘things’’ can be photographs, dried
plants, or 3 5 cards with names of people on them. (Respondents often
ask ‘‘What do you mean by things being ‘the same’ or ‘fitting together’?’’ Tell
them that you are interested in what they think that means.) By doing this for
all triples from a list of things or concepts, you can explore differences in
cognition among individuals, and among cultures and subcultures.
Suppose you ask a group of Americans to ‘‘choose the item that is least like
the other two’’ in each of the following triads:
DOLPHIN MOOSE WHALE
SHARK DOLPHIN MOOSE
All three items in the first triad are mammals, but two of them are sea mammals.
Some native speakers of English will choose ‘‘dolphin’’ as the odd item
because ‘‘whales and moose are both big mammals and the dolphin is
smaller.’’ In my experience, though, most people will choose ‘‘moose’’ as the
most different because ‘‘whales and dolphins are both sea animals.’’ In the
second triad, many of the same people who chose ‘‘moose’’ in the first triad
will choose ‘‘shark’’ because moose and dolphins are both mammals and
sharks are not.
But some people who chose ‘‘moose’’ in triad 1 will choose ‘‘moose’’ again