Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

422 Chapter 15
logical study of human movement in general (Farnell 1994, 1996; Farnell and
Graham 1998).
These days, behavioral coding in psychology and ethology is being done
with handheld computers. This is being facilitated by software that lets you
program any key to mean ‘‘initiates conversation,’’ ‘‘reciprocates affect,’’ or
whatever. (See Ice [2004] for a detailed review of this technology and appendix
F.) As it becomes easier for fieldworkers to observe and code behavior at
the same time, I think we’ll see renewed interest in continuous monitoring and
in the use of complex coding schemes like labanotation. (One of the problems
in the use of direct observation is the need for reliable coding by several
researchers of the same data. We’ll take up measures of intercoder reliability
in chapter 17 on text analysis. The problem of testing intercoder reliability is
the same, whether you’re coding text or behavior.)
Comparative Research: The Six Culture Study
Broad, general coding schemes are particularly useful for comparative
research. Whether you’re comparing sessions of psychotherapy groups, interaction
sessions in laboratory experiments, or the natural behavior of people in
field studies, using a common coding scheme really pays off because you can
make direct comparisons across cases and look for generalizations.
The most important comparative study of children ever was run by Beatrice
and John Whiting between 1954 and 1956. In the Six Culture Project, field
researchers spent from 6 to 14 months in Okinawa, Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines,
New England, and India. They made a total of some 3,000 5-minute
(continuous monitoring) observations on 67 girls and 67 boys between the
ages of 3 and 11.
Observations were limited to just 5 minutes because they were so intense,
produced so much data, and required so much concentration and effort that
researchers would have become fatigued and lost a lot of data in longer sessions.
The investigators wrote out, in clear sentences, everything they saw
children doing during the observation periods. They also recorded data about
the physical environment and others with whom children were interacting.
The data were sent from the field to Harvard University for coding according
to a scheme of 12 behavior categories that had been worked out in research
going back some 15 years before the Six Culture Study began. The behavioral
categories included: seeks help, seeks attention, seeks dominance, suggests,
offers support, offers help, acts socially, touches, reprimands, assaults sociably,
assaults not sociably, symbolic aggression (frightens, insults, threatens
with gesture, challenges to compete). (Full details on the use of the Whiting