Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 353
oped by Peter Rossi for the factorial survey (see chapter 10). Mothers are presented
with cases in which variables are changed systematically (‘‘Your child
wakes up with [mild] [strong] fever. He complains that he has [a headache]
[stomach ache],’’ and so on) and are asked to talk about how they would handle
the case.
All this evidence—the free narratives, the pile sorts, the vignettes, etc.—is
used in understanding the emic part of ARI, the local explanatory model for
the illness.
Researchers also identify etic factors that make it easy or hard for mothers
to get medical care for children who have pneumonia. These are things like
the distance to a clinic, the availability of transportation, the number of young
children at home, the availability to mothers of people with whom they can
leave their children for a while, and so on. (For an example of the FES in use,
see Hudelson 1994.)
The key to high-quality, quick ethnography, according to Handwerker
(2001), is to go into a study with a clear question and to limit your study to
five focus variables. If the research is exploratory, you just have to make a
reasonable guess as to what variables might be important and hope for the
best. Most rapid assessment studies, however, are applied research, which usually
means that you can take advantage of earlier, long-term studies to narrow
your focus.
For example, Edwins Laban Moogi Gwako (1997) spent over a year testing
the effects of eight independent variables on Maragoli women’s agricultural
productivity in western Kenya. At the end of his doctoral research, he found
that just two variables—women’s land tenure security and the total value of
their household wealth—accounted for 46% of the variance in productivity of
plots worked by women. None of the other variables—household size, a woman’s
age, whether a woman’s husband lived at home, and so on—had any
effect on the dependent variable.
If you were doing a rapid assessment of women’s agricultural productivity
elsewhere in east Africa, you would take advantage of Laban Moogi Gwako’s
work and limit the variables you tested to perhaps four or five—the two that
he found were important and perhaps two or three others. You can study this
same problem for a lifetime, and the more time you spend, the more you’ll
understand the subtleties and complexities of the problem. But the point here
is that if you have a clear question and a few, clearly defined variables, you
can produce quality work in a lot less time than you might imagine. For more
on rapid ethnographic assessment, see Bentley et al. (1988), Scrimshaw and
Hurtado (1987), and Scrimshaw and Gleason (1992). See Baker (1996a,
1996b) for a PRA study of homeless children in Kathmandu.