Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Direct and Indirect Observation 447
This led Rathje to compare the food loss rate among Mexican Americans
and Anglos in Tucson and Milwaukee. ‘‘The final results of Mexican-American
cooking,’’ Rathje said, ‘‘can be extremely varied—chimichangas, burros,
enchiladas, tacos, and more—but the basic set of ingredients are very few
compared to standard Anglo fare. Thus, Mexican-American households
should throw out less food than Anglo households’’ (Rathje 1984:17–18). In
fact, this is exactly what Rathje found in both Tucson and Milwaukee.
Beside Tucson and Milwaukee, studies of fresh household garbage have
been done in New Orleans, Marin County (California), Mexico City, and Sydney
(Australia).
Pros and Cons of Trace Studies
The most important advantage of trace studies is that they are nonreactive,
so long as the people you are studying are kept in the dark about what you are
doing. What happens when people are told that their garbage is being monitored?
Rittenbaugh and Harrison (1984) compared data from an experimental
group (people who were told that their garbage was being monitored) and a
control group (people who were not told). There was no difference in the
refuse disposal behavior of the experimental and control groups—with one
important exception. The number of empty bottles of alcoholic drinks that
showed up was significantly lower when people knew that their garbage was
being monitored.
Where did the extra bottles go? Buried in the back yard? Stuffed in the trash
cans of neighbors who were not in the sample? It remains a mystery.
In addition to being nonreactive, behavioral trace studies yield enormous
amounts of data that can be standardized, quantified, and compared across
groups and over time (Rathje 1979). Moreover, traces reflect many behaviors
more accurately than informant reports of those behaviors.
In 1986, as part of a contract with the Heinz Corporation, Rathje and his
colleagues asked women in the Tucson area if they had used any store-bought
baby food in the past week. Uniformly, the Hispanic mothers insisted that they
had not used any such product. You can guess the rest: They had as many
baby-food jars in their garbage as did the Anglo households. As it turned out,
45% of the Hispanic women in Tucson at the time were working outside the
home (Rathje and Murphy 1992). Those women were caught in a bind: They
didn’t have time to prepare homemade baby food, but they couldn’t admit this
to a stranger asking questions.
Trace studies like the Garbage Project have plenty of problems, however.
Early in the project, it became apparent that garbage disposals were going to
be a serious problem. The researchers constructed a subsample of 32 house-