Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Foundations of Social Research 29
thing causes variation in another. Some common variables that you’ll find in
social research are age, sex, ethnicity, race, education, income, marital status,
and occupation.
A few of the hundreds of variables you’ll see in anthropological research
include number of children by each of several wives in a polygynous household,
distance from a clinic or a market or a source of clean water, blood pressure,
and level of support for various causes (the distribution of clean needles
to drug addicts, the new farmer’s co-op, rebels fighting in Eritrea, etc.).
Variables Have Dimensions
Variables can be unidimensional or multidimensional. The distance from
Boston to Denver can be expressed in driving time or in miles, but no matter
how you measure it, distance is expressed as a straight line and straight lines
are one dimensional. You can see this in figure 2.1.
Boston
Three days' driving
Denver
Boston
1,863 miles
Figure 2.1. Two ways to measure distance.
Denver
If we add Miami, we have three distances: Boston-Miami, Boston-Denver,
Denver-Miami. One dimension isn’t enough to express the relation among
three cities. We have to use two dimensions. Look at figure 2.2.
The two dimensions in figure 2.2 are up-down and right-left, or North-
South and East-West. If we add Nairobi to the exercise, we’d either have to
add a third dimension (straight through the paper at a slight downward angle
from Denver), or do what Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) did to force a
three-dimensional object (the Earth) into a two-dimensional picture. Mercator
was able to project a sphere in two dimensions, but at the cost of distortion at
the edges. This is why, on a map of the world, Greenland (an island of 840,000
square miles), looks the same size as China (a land mass of about 3.7 million
square miles).
Height, weight, birth order, age, and marital status are unidimensional variables
and are relatively easy to measure. By contrast, political orientation
(being conservative or liberal) is multidimensional and is, therefore, a lot more
difficult to measure. We often talk about political orientation as if it were unidimensional,
with people lying somewhere along a line between strictly con-