Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

322 Chapter 12
safe to assume that you know the answer to question 1. This means that, in
general, knowledge about basic math is a unidimensional variable.
Now consider a highland, Aymara-speaking Bolivian village. As part of
your study, you need to measure the level of acculturation of each person.
That is, you want to assign a single number to each person—a number that
represents how acculturated to nonindigenous, national Bolivian culture each
person is. After some time in the community, you come to understand that
there are three key points of acculturation: dress, language, and housing. As
Indians acculturate, they dress in Western clothes, learn to speak Spanish fluently
(in addition to or instead of Aymara), and build Western-style houses.
From your ethnographic work, you reason that people need significant
wealth to afford a Western-style house, with all the imported materials that
building one entails. People who have wealth participate in the national economy,
which means that they must be fluent in Spanish. Anyone, however, can
afford to adopt Western-style clothes, especially used clothing. According to
your theory, Western dress is the easiest item to adopt; Spanish comes next;
and then comes Western houses.
To test whether the indicators you’ve identified form a unidimensional, or
Guttman scale, set up a table like table 12.1. It’s not pretty.
Persons 1, 2, and 3 scored positive on all three items. They each get 3
TABLE 12.1
An Index That Scales with a Guttman Coefficient of Reproducibility 0.90
Informant Western clothes Fluent Spanish Western house
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16