Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis 453
ultimately all qualitative. It starts before you collect data—you have to have
some ideas about what you’re going to study—and it continues throughout
any research effort. As you develop ideas, you test them against your observations:
Your observations may then modify your ideas, which then need to be
tested again, and so on. Don’t look for closure in the process. If you’re doing
it right, it never stops.
Most methods for quantitative analysis—things like factor analysis, cluster
analysis, regression analysis, and so on—are really methods for data processing
and for finding patterns in data. Interpreting those patterns is up to you.
Interpretation—telling us what findings mean, linking your findings to the
findings of other research—starts with ideas in your head and comes out in
words on paper. It’s a pretty qualitative exercise.
Don’t worry about getting ideas. Once you have data in your hands, words
or numbers, your hardest job will be to sort through all the ideas you get and
decide which ones to test. And don’t worry about seeing patterns in your data
or about not being able to come up with causal explanations for things you
see. It can happen very fast, often in a matter of hours or days after starting
any research project, so be suspicious of your pet ideas and continually check
yourself to make sure you’re not inventing or at least not embellishing patterns.
Seeing patterns that aren’t there happens all the time in research, qualitative
or quantitative, just from eagerness and observer expectations. If you are
highly self-critical, your tendency to see patterns everywhere will diminish as
the research progresses.
The Constant Validity Check
The problem can also get worse, though, if you accept uncritically the folk
analyses of articulate or prestigious informants. It’s important to seek the emic
perspective and to document folk analyses (Lofland 1971), but as your interviews
and field notes pile up, try consciously to switch back and forth between
the emic and etic perspectives. Check yourself from either buying into folk
explanations or rejecting them without considering their possible validity. It’s
not hard to do this, it’s just hard to remember to do it systematically. Here are
some guidelines.
1. If you are interviewing people, look for consistencies and inconsistencies among
knowledgeable informants and find out why those informants disagree about
important things.
2. Whenever possible, check people’s reports of behavior or of environmental conditions
against more objective evidence. If you were a journalist and submitted a
story based on informants’ reports without checking the facts, you’d never get it