Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Direct and Indirect Observation 431
fourth. His data show that gardening takes up about 26% of the Abelam’s
daylight hours, but only 20% of their total waking time in each 24-hour period.
Of course, it may not always be possible to conduct TA studies at night.
Johnson, you’ll remember, made a point of the fact that the Machiguenga discourage
nighttime visiting. Scaglion, on the other hand, worked among a people
who ‘‘go visiting at unusual hours, even when their prospective host is
likely to be sleeping.’’
Scaglion, in fact, rather enjoyed showing up at people’s houses during odd
hours in 1983. He had done his doctoral research in the same village in 1974–
1975. In those days, he says, ‘‘I was still quite a novelty. . . . I was frequently
awakened by hearing ‘Minoa, mine kwak?’ (‘Hey, you, are you sleeping?’).
This study allowed me to return old favors by visiting people in the late night
hours to be sure they were sleeping’’ (ibid.:539). (For more examples of TA
studies, see Bock 2002 and Umezaki et al. 2002.)
Coding and Recording Time Allocation Data
Sampling is one of two problems in TA research. The other is measurement.
How do we know that when Oboler recorded that someone was ‘‘working,’’
we would have recorded the same thing? If you were with Johnson when he
recorded that someone was engaged in ‘‘hygiene behavior,’’ would you have
agreed with his assessment? Every time? You see the problem.
It gets even more thorny. Suppose you work out a coding scheme that
everyone agrees with. And suppose you train other observers to see just what
you see. (Rogoff [1978] achieved a phenomenal 98% interobserver agreement
in her study of 9 year olds in Guatemala.) Or, if you are doing the research all
by yourself, suppose you are absolutely consistent in recording behaviors (i.e.,
you never code someone lying in a hammock as sleeping when they’re just
lounging around awake).
Even if all these reliability problems are taken care of, what about observation
validity? What do you do, for example, when you see people engaged in
multiple behaviors? A woman might be holding a baby and stirring a pot at
the same time. Do you code her as engaged in child care or in cooking? (Gross
1984:542). If someone saw that you were lying down reading, and you were
studying for an exam, should they record that you were working or relaxing?
Do you record all behaviors? Do you mark one behavior as primary? This
last question has important implications for data analysis. There are only so
many minutes in a day, and the percentage of people’s time that they allocate
to activities has to add up to 100%. If you code multiple activities as equally
important, then there will be more than 100% of the day accounted for. Most
TA researchers use their intuition, based on participant observation, to decide