Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

432 Chapter 15
which of the multiple simultaneous activities they witness to record as the
primary one and which as secondary.
The best solution is to record all possible behaviors you observe in the order
of their primacy, according to your best judgment at the time of observation.
Use a check sheet to record behaviors. Use a separate check sheet for each
observation you make. This can mean printing up 1,000 sheets for a TA study,
and hauling them home later.
This is one of two good reasons to use handheld computers to record observational
data. Programs are now available for these devices that give you the
equivalent of an electronic check sheet and let you watch behavior and code
it on the spot (see appendix F).
The other good reason to give up paper check sheets if you can is that, eventually,
you have to type in the data anyway, transferring them from paper to
computer so you can run statistical analyses. Each time you record behavioral
data—as you watch it and as you transfer it from paper to computer—there is
a chance of error. That’s just how it is. So eliminating one step in the data
management process cuts down on errors in data.
If you must hand-code your original observations, then enter the data into
a laptop while you’re still in the field, as a precaution against loss of the original
data sheets. Be paranoid about data. Those horror stories you’ve heard
about lost data? They’re true. (Read M. N. Srinivas’s account [1979:xiii] of
how he lost all three copies of his field notes, compiled over a period of 18
years, in a fire at Stanford.)
Experience Sampling (ES)
In experience sampling (ES), people carry around little beepers. When the
beeper goes off, they fill out a questionnaire about what they’re doing, or who
they’re with, or what they’re feeling at the moment. Some researchers ask
informants to jot an entry into a diary or talk about their actions, feelings, and
surroundings into a small digital or tape recorder, and some researchers even
ask informants to call a number and report, live, to a telephone interviewer
(Kubey et al. 1996).
ES offers two big advantages. First, it combines the power of random spot
checks with the relative ease of having people report on their own behavior.
Csikszentmihalyi and Larson (1987) demonstrated the reliability of ES in a
number of studies. Validity is another matter, of course, but when people
record or talk about what they’re doing and how they’re feeling on the spot,
this should lessen the inherent inaccuracy of recall data. The other advantage
is that, working on your own, you can only be in one place at a time, but with