Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Structured Interviewing II: Cultural Domain Analysis 315
nahakaa' hinaanii
land dwellers
naaghaii
walkers
naat'a'ii
fowl
naa'na'ii
crawlers
ch'osh
insects
jinaaghaii
day animals
dine
man
naaldlooshii
animals with
large torsos
tl'ee'naaghaii
night animals
baahadzidi
dangerous
animals
Figure 11.1. Part of the Navajo animal kingdom, derived from a pile sort.
SOURCE: N. Perchonock and O. Werner, ‘‘Navaho Systems of Classification: Some Implications for Ethnoscience,’’
Ethnology, Vol. 8, pp. 229–42. Copyright 1969. Reprinted with permission.
informants to explain why people appear in the same pile. This produces a
wealth of information about the cognitively defined social structure of a group.
Paired Comparisons
The method of paired comparisons is an alternative way to get rank orderings
of a list of items in a domain. Remember, for any set of things, there are
n(n–1)/2 pairs of those things. Suppose you have a list of five colors: red,
green, yellow, blue, and brown. Figure 11.2 shows the paired comparison test
to find out an informant’s rank-ordered preference for these five colors.
You might say: ‘‘Here are two animals. Which one is the more ?’’
where the blank is filled in by ‘‘vicious,’’ or ‘‘wild,’’ or ‘‘smarter,’’ or some
other descriptor.
You could ask informants to choose the ‘‘illness in this pair that is more life
threatening,’’ or ‘‘the food in this pair that is better for you,’’ or ‘‘the crime in
this pair that you’re most afraid of.’’
I’ve presented the pairs in figure 11.2 in such a way that you can easily see
how the 10 of them exhausts the possibilities for five items. When you present
a paired comparison test to an informant, be sure to scramble the order of the
pairs to ensure against order effects—that is, where something about the
order of the items in a list influences the choices that informants make. You
can use Anthropac to do this.
To find the rank order of the list for each informant, you simply count up
how many times each item in a list ‘‘wins’’—that is, how many times it was