Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

434 Chapter 15
The results were mixed. The men found working on the computer-controlled
machines more interesting, more satisfying, and more important than
working on the manual machines, and they found programming the computercontrolled
machines even more interesting than running them. But these
machinists also felt more in control when they worked on manual lathes.
If you use self-administered questionnaires, of course, you need literate
informants to do experience sampling. But, as Chick says, ‘‘with more and
more anthropological research in modern and modernizing societies, experience
sampling can be a valuable addition to the anthropologist’s tool kit’’
(1994:6). And if you give people little tape recorders or digital recorders, you
may be able to use the ES method with nonliterate populations. (For more on
the experience sampling method, see Scollon et al. [2005]; and see Kahneman
et al. [2004] for a method that duplicates experience sampling through direct
interviews rather than with beeper interrupts.)
Combining Continuous Monitoring and Spot Sampling
The difference between CM and spot sampling is analogous to the difference
between ethnography and survey research. With ethnography, you get
information about process; with survey research, you get data that let you estimate
parameters for a population. Spot sampling is used in TA research precisely
because the goal is to estimate parameters—like how much time, on
average, women spend cooking, or men spend throwing pots, or children
spend laid up ill at home. If you want to know the ingredients of mafongo (a
dish native to Puerto Rico) and the order in which they are added, you have
to watch continuously as someone makes it. (Making it yourself, as part of
participant observation, produces embodied knowledge, yet a third kind of
information.)
Robin O’Brian (1998) combined CM and spot sampling in her study of
Mayan craftswomen in Chiapas, Mexico. The women sold their crafts to tourists
at a local market. Several times a week, O’Brian went through the market
(entering from a randomly selected spot each time) and coded what every
woman craft seller was doing, using a check sheet adapted from Johnson
(1987) standardized time allocation activity codes.
O’Brian also did continuous monitoring for 3 hours of 15 women, and these
two kinds of data produced more information than either kind alone. Her
aggregate, spot-sampling data showed that the women spent 82% of their time
waiting for tourists to buy something. The women weren’t just sitting around,
though. They spent 17% of their waiting time producing more crafts (doing
macramé or embroidery or hand-spinning wool) and another 17% eating,