Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

454 Chapter 16
past your editor’s desk. Why not hold anthropologists to the standard that journalists
face every day?
3. Be open to negative evidence rather than annoyed when it pops up. When you
run into a case that doesn’t fit your theory, ask yourself whether it’s the result
of: (a) normal intracultural variation, (b) your lack of knowledge about the
range of appropriate behavior, or (c) a genuinely unusual case.
4. As you come to understand how something works, seek out alternative explanations
from key informants and from colleagues, and listen to them carefully.
American folk culture, for example, holds that women left home for the workforce
because of what are widely called ‘‘feminism’’ and ‘‘women’s liberation.’’
That’s a popular emic explanation. An alternative explanation is that feminist
values and orientations are supported, if not caused, by women being driven out
of their homes and into the workforce by the hyperinflation during the 1970s that
drove down the purchasing power of their husbands’ incomes (Margolis 1984).
Both the emic, folk explanation and the etic explanation are interesting for different
reasons.
5. Try to fit extreme cases into your theory, and if the cases won’t fit, don’t be too
quick to throw them out. It is always easier to throw out cases than it is to reexamine
your own ideas, but the easy way out is hardly ever the right way in
research.
Data Matrices
One of the most important concepts in all data analysis—whether we’re
working with quantitative or qualitative data—is the data matrix. There are
two basic kinds of data matrices: profile matrices and proximity matrices.
Figure 16.1 shows what these two kinds of matrices look like:
Profile Matrices
Across the social sciences, most data analysis is about how properties of
things are related to one another. We ask, for example, ‘‘Is the ability to hunt
related to the number of wives a man has?’’ ‘‘Is having an independent source
of income related to women’s total fertility?’’ ‘‘Are remittances from labor
migrants related to the achievement in school of children left behind?’’ ‘‘Is the
per capita gross national product of a nation related to the probability that it
will go to war with its neighbors?’’
This is called profile analysis. You start with series of things—units of
analysis—and you measure a series of variables for each of those things. This
produces a profile matrix, or, simply, a data matrix. A data matrix is a table
of cases and their associated variables. Each unit of analysis is profiled by a