Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

308 Chapter 11
because sharks and dolphins are sea creatures, while moose are not. Giving
people a judiciously chosen set of triad stimuli can help you understand interindividual
similarities and differences in how people think about the items in
a cultural domain.
The triads test was developed in psychology (see Kelly 1955; Torgerson
1958) and has long been used in studies of cognition. Romney and D’Andrade
(1964) presented people with triads of American kinship terms and asked
them to choose the term that was most dissimilar in each triad. For example,
when they presented informants with the triad ‘‘father, son, nephew,’’ 67%
selected ‘‘nephew’’ as the most different of the three items. Twenty-two percent
chose ‘‘father’’ and only 2% chose ‘‘son.’’ Romney and D’Andrade asked
people to explain why they’d selected each item on a triad. For the triad
‘‘grandson, brother, father,’’ for example, one informant said that a ‘‘grandson
is most different because he is moved down further’’ (p. 161). There’s a lot of
cultural wisdom in that statement.
By studying which pairs of kinship terms their informants chose most often
as being as similar, Romney and D’Andrade were able to isolate some of the
salient components of the American kinship system (components such as male
vs. female, ascending vs. descending generation, etc.). They were able to do
this, at least, for the group of informants they used. Repeating their tests on
other populations of Americans, or on the same population over time, would
yield interesting comparisons.
Lieberman and Dressler (1977) used triad tests to examine intracultural
variation in ethnomedical beliefs on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. They
wanted to know if cognition of disease terms varied with bilingual proficiency.
They used 52 bilingual English-Patois speakers, and 10 monolingual Patois
speakers. From ethnographic interviewing and cross-checking against various
informants, they isolated nine disease terms that were important to St.
Lucians.
Here’s the formula for finding the number of triads in a list of n items:
The number of triads in n items n(n1)(n2)
6
Formula 11.1
In this case, n 9, so there are 84 possible triads.
Lieberman and Dressler gave each of the 52 bilingual informants two triad
tests, a week apart: one in Patois and one in English. (Naturally, they randomized
the order of the items within each triad, and also randomized the order of
presentation of the triads to informants.) They also measured how bilingual
their informants were, using a standard test. The 10 monolingual Patois informants
were simply given the Patois triad test.
The researchers counted the number of times that each possible pair of