Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

336 Chapter 12
high on the factor or factors (the underlying concept or concepts) they are
trying to understand.
If you want to see what professional scale developers do, consult any of the
following: Klonoff and Landrine (2000) (a scale for measuring acculturation
among African Americans), Staats et al. (1996) (a scale measuring commitment
to pets), Sin and Yau (2004) (a scale for measuring female role orientation
in China), and Simpson and Gangstad (1991) (a scale that measures willingness
to engage in uncommitted sexual relations).
Most anthropologists won’t develop major scales for others to use, but what
you should do is test the unidimensionality of any measures you develop for
your own field data, using factor analysis—once you understand the principles
of scale development that I’ve laid out here. (And just for the record, some
anthropologists do develop scales. See Handwerker [1997] for a scale to measure
family violence in Barbados and Gatz and Hurwicz [1990] for a scale to
measure depression in old people.)
Semantic Differential Scales
I’ve always liked the semantic differential scaling method. It was developed
in the 1950s by Charles Osgood and his associates at the University of Illinois
and has become an important research tool in cognitive studies, including psychology,
anthropology, and sociology (Osgood et al. 1957; Snider and Osgood
1969). It has also been used by thousands of researchers across the social sciences,
and with good reason: The semantic differential test is easy to construct
and easy to administer.
Osgood was interested in how people interpret things—inanimate things
(like artifacts or monuments), animate things (like persons or the self), behaviors
(like incest, or buying a new car, or shooting a deer), and intangible concepts
(like gun control or literacy). Of course, this is exactly what Likert
scales are designed to test, but instead of asking people to rate questionnaire
items about things, Osgood tested people’s feelings differently: He gave them
a target item and a list of paired adjectives about the target. The adjective
pairs could come from reading of the literature or from focus groups or from
ethnographic interviews. Target items can be ideas (land reform, socialism,
aggression), behaviors (smoking, running, hunting deer with a bow an arrow),
objects (the mall, a courtroom, horses), environmental conditions (rain,
drought, jungle) . . . almost anything.
Figure 12.1 is an example of a semantic differential test. The target is ‘‘having
a cold.’’ If you were taking this test right now, you’d be asked to place a
check on each line, depending on your reaction to each pair of adjectives.