Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Structured Interviewing II: Cultural Domain Analysis 311
triad test, one for each informant. (Randomizing the order in which the triads
appear to informants eliminates ‘‘order-effects’’—possible biases that come
from responding to a list of stimuli in a particular order.)
Boster et al. (1987) used a triad test in their study of the social network of
an office. There were 16 employees, so there were 16 ‘‘items’’ in the cultural
domain (‘‘the list of all the people who work here’’ is a perfectly good
domain). A lambda 2 test with 16 items has 80 distinct triads. Informants were
asked to ‘‘judge which of three actors was the most different from the other
two.’’
Triad tests are easy to create with Anthropac, easy to administer, and easy
to score, but they can only be used when you have relatively few items in a
cultural domain. In literate societies, most informants can respond to 200 triads
in less than half an hour, but it can be a really boring exercise, and boring
your informants is a really bad idea. I find that informants can easily handle
lambda 2 triad tests with up to 15 items and 70 triads. But I also find that
people generally prefer—even like—to do pile sorts.
Free Pile Sorts
In 1966, John Brim put the names of 58 American English role terms
(mother, gangster, stockbroker, etc.) on slips of paper. He asked 108 high
school students in San Mateo, California, to spread the slips out on their desks
and to ‘‘put the terms together which you feel belong together’’ (Burton and
Romney 1975:400). This simple, compelling method for collecting data about
what goes with what was introduced to anthropology by Michael Burton, who
analyzed Brim’s data using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering.
These powerful tools were brand new at the time and are used today
across the social sciences (Burton 1968, 1972). (We’ll get back to MDS and
clustering in chapter 21 on multivariate analysis.)
Informants often ask two questions when asked to do a pile sort: (1) ‘‘What
do you mean by ‘belong together’?’’ and (2) ‘‘Can I put something in more
than one pile?’’ The answer to the first question is ‘‘There are no right or
wrong answers. We want to learn what you think about these things.’’
The easy answer to the second question is ‘‘no,’’ because there is one card
per item and a card can only be in one pile at a time. This answer cuts off a
lot of information, however, because people can think of items in a cultural
domain along several dimensions at once. For example, in a pile sort of consumer
electronics, someone might want to put a DVD recorder in one pile with
TVs (for the obvious association) and in another pile with camcorders (for
another obvious association), but might not want to put camcorders and TVs