Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

386 Chapter 13
ment. You might conclude, Miller says, that men are more supportive than
women are of equality for women in combat roles. Some men with whom
Miller spoke, however, said that women should be given the right to serve in
combat so that, once and for all, everyone will see that women can’t cut it.
Are men really what Miller called ‘‘hostile proponents’’ of equality for
women? Could that be why the statistics show so many more men in favor of
women serving in combat units? Miller went back to her questionnaire data:
About 20% of men in her survey said that women should be assigned to combat
units just like men were—but almost to a man they also said that putting
women into combat units would reduce the military’s effectiveness.
In other words, the numerical analysis showed that Miller’s concept of
‘‘hostile proponent of equality’’ was correct. This subtle concept advances our
understanding considerably of how gender harassment against women works
in the U.S. Army.
Did you notice the constant feedback between ethnographic and survey data
here? The ethnography produced ideas for policy recommendations and for
the content of a questionnaire. The questionnaire data illuminated and validated
many of the things that the ethnographer learned during participant
observation. Those same survey data produced anomalies—things that didn’t
quite fit with the ethnographer’s intuition. More ethnography turned up an
explanation for the anomalies. And so on. Ethnographic and survey data combined
produce more insight than either does alone.
For more on participant observation fieldwork, see Bogdan 1972, Lofland
1976, Spradley 1980, Stocking 1983, Kirk and Miller 1986, Woods 1986, Fine
and Sandstrom 1988, Fenno 1990, Burawoy 1991, Behar 1996, Smith and
Kornblum 1996, Gummerson 2000, DeWalt and DeWalt 2002, Anderson
2003, and Wolcott 2005.