Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

448 Chapter 15
holds, some of which had disposals, some of which did not. They studied
these 32 households for 5 weeks and developed a ‘‘garbage disposal correction
factor’’ (Rathje 1984:16).
As the project went on, researchers learned that some families were recycling
all their aluminum cans, while others were throwing theirs in the trash.
This made it difficult to compare households regarding their consumption of
soft drinks and beer. Some families had compost heaps that they used as fertilizer
for their vegetable gardens. This distorted the refuse count for those families.
Garbage Project researchers had to develop correction factors for all of
these biases, too (see Harrison 1976).
As with much unobtrusive research, the Garbage Project raised some difficult
ethical problems. To protect the privacy of the households in the study,
no addresses or names of household members are recorded. All personal
items, such as photographs and letters, are thrown out without being examined.
The hundreds of student sorters who have worked on the project have
signed pledges not to save anything from the refuse they examine. All the
sampling, sorting, and data analysis procedures are approved by the Human
Subjects Research Committee of the University of Arizona.
The Garbage Project received consistent coverage in the press, both nationally
and locally in Tucson. In 1984, after 10 years of work, Hughes reported
that ‘‘no public concern over the issue of personal privacy has been expressed,
and community response has been supportive’’ (Hughes 1984:42). With
proper safeguards, trace measures can be used to generate useful data about
human behavior.
Archival Research
One of the great advantages to doing archival research is that it is truly nonreactive.
Whether you’re studying archival records of births, migrations, visits
to a hospital, or purchases of hybrid seed, people can’t change their behavior
after the fact. Of course, the original data might have been collected reactively,
but that’s one reason why historians demand such critical examination of
sources.
Another advantage of doing what Caroline Brettell calls ‘‘fieldwork in the
archives’’ (1998) is that you can study things using archival data that would
be too politically ‘‘hot’’ to study any other way. And archival research is inexpensive.
Be on the lookout for interesting archival materials: government
reports, personal diaries or photo collections, industrial data, medical records,
school records, wills, deeds, records of court cases, tax rolls, and land-holding
records.