Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Scales and Scaling 323
points. The next three (4, 5, and 6) wear Western clothes and speak fluent
Spanish, but live in indigenous-style houses. They each get 2 points. Person 7
wears Western clothes, but does not speak fluent Spanish, and does not live in
a Western-style house. This informant gets 1 point on the acculturation index.
Persons 8 and 9 have no acculturation points. They wear traditional dress,
speak little Spanish, and live in traditional homes. So far so good.
The next three (10, 11, 12) speak fluent Spanish but wear traditional dress
and live in traditional houses. The next three (13, 14, 15) live in Western-style
homes but wear traditional dress and are not fluent in Spanish. Finally, person
16 wears Western clothes and lives in a Western house, but is not fluent in
Spanish.
If we had data from only the first nine respondents, the data would form a
perfect Guttman scale. For those first nine respondents, in other words, the
three behaviors are indicators of a unidimensional variable, acculturation.
The Coefficient of Reproducibility
Unfortunately, we’ve got those other seven people to deal with. For whatever
reasons, informants 10–16 do not conform to the pattern produced by the
data from informants 1–9. The data for persons 10–16 are ‘‘errors’’ in the
sense that their data diminish the extent to which the index of alienation forms
a perfect scale. To test how closely any set of index data reproduces a perfect
scale, apply Guttman’s coefficient of reproducibility, or CR. The formula for
Guttman’s CR is:
1
number of errors
number of entries
Formula 12.1
Given the pattern in table 12.1 (and from our hypothesis about the order in
which people adopt the three indicators of acculturation), we don’t expect to
see those minus signs in column 1 for respondents 10, 11, and 12. If the data
scaled according to our hypothesis, then anyone who speaks fluent Spanish
and lives in a traditional house should wear Western-style clothes, as is the
case with informants 4, 5, and 6. Those informants have a score of 2. It would
take three corrections to make cases 10, 11, and 12 conform to the hypothesis
(you’d have to replace the minus signs in column one with pluses for respondents
10, 11, and 12), so we count cases 10, 11, and 12 as having one error
each.
We don’t expect to see the plus signs in column 3 for informants 13, 14,
and 15. If our hypothesis were correct, anyone who has a plus in column 3
should have all pluses and a score of 3 on acculturation. If we give respondents
13, 14, and 15 a scale score of 3 (for living in a Western-style house), then