Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

456 Chapter 16
TABLE 16.2
Profile Matrix for Two Cases and Six Variables
Variable
Spent on Spent on Years How How many
Spent on meat, fish, other in many in under 15
Respondent vegetables or poultry foods Age school Married house in house
1 330 420 215 34 8 1 4 2
2 195 250 300 60 6 0 7 3
Proximity Matrices
Profile matrices contain measurements of variables for a set of items. Proximity
matrices contain measurements of relations, or proximities, between
items. If the measurements in a proximity matrix tell how close things are to
each other then you have a similarity matrix. If the measurements in a proximity
matrix tell how far apart things are from each other, then you have a
dissimilarity matrix.
If you’ve ever read one of those tables of distances between cities that you
see on road maps, you’ve had experience with a dissimilarity matrix. The bigger
the number in the cells, the more ‘‘dissimilar’’ two cities are. In this case,
dissimilarity means that the larger the number in any cell, the further apart
two cities are on the map.
If you’ve had a course in statistics and seen a correlation matrix, then
you’ve had experience with a similarity matrix. The bigger the number in each
cell—the higher the correlation—the more alike two things are.
Figure 16.1(b) shows a similarity matrix of variables. Imagine the list of
variable names stretching several feet to the right, off the right-hand margin
of the page, and several feet down, off the lower margin. That is what would
happen if you had, say, 100 variables about each of your respondents. For each
and every pair of variables in the matrix of data, you could ask: Are these
variables related?
We’ll need the concept of a proximity matrix when we get to multivariate
analysis in chapter 21.
Presenting Results in Matrices and Tables
An important part of all analysis, qualitative and quantitative, is the production
of visual displays. Laying out your data in table or matrix form and drawing
your theories out in the form of a flow chart or map helps you understand