Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

458 Chapter 16
The social organization of the traditional fishing operation is more homogeneous,
more expressive, and more collegial than that of the modern operation,
but profits are lower. Based on the qualitative analysis, Van Maanen et al. were
able to state some general, theoretical hypotheses regarding the weakening of
personal relations in technology-based fishing operations. This is the kind of
general proposition that can be tested by using fishing operations as units of
analysis and their technologies as the independent variable.
Donna Birdwell-Pheasant (1984) wanted to understand how differences in
interpersonal relations change over time in the village of Chunox, Belize. She
questioned 216 people about their relations with members of their families
over the years, and simulated a longitudinal study with data from a cross-sectional
sample. She checked the retrospective data with other information gathered
by questionnaires, direct observations, and semistructured interviews.
Table 16.4 shows the analytic framework that emerged from Birdwell-Pheasant’s
work.
Birdwell-Pheasant identified five kinds of relations: absent, attenuated,
coordinate, subordinate, and superordinate. These represent the rows of the
matrix in table 16.4. The columns in the matrix are the four major types of
family relations: ascending generation (parents, aunts, uncles, etc.), siblings,
spouse, and descending generation (children, nephews, and nieces, etc.).
Birdwell-Pheasant then went through her data and ‘‘examined all the available
data on Juana Fulana and decided whether, in 1971, she had a coordinate
or subordinate relationship with her mother (e.g., did she have her own
kitchen? her own wash house?).’’ (In Latin America, Juan Fulano and Juana
Fulana are the male and female equivalents of ‘‘so-and-so’’—as in ‘‘Is so-andso
married?’’)
Birdwell-Pheasant repeated the process, for each of her 216 informants, for
each of the four relations in table 16.4, and for each of the years 1965, 1971,
1973, 1975, and 1977. This required 216(4)(5) 4,320 decisions. Birdwell-
Pheasant didn’t have data on all possible informant-by-year-by-relation combinations,
but, by the time she was through, she had a database of 742 ‘‘power
readings’’ of family relations over time and was able to make some very strong
statements about patterns of domestic structure over time in Chunox. This is
an excellent example of the use of qualitative data to develop a theory, and
the conversion of qualitative data to a set of numbers for testing that theory.
Stephen Fjellman and Hugh Gladwin (1985) studied the family histories of
Haitian migrants to the United States. Fjellman and Gladwin found an elegant
way to present a lot of information about those histories in a simple chart.
Table 16.5 shows one chart for a family of four people in 1982.
This Haitian American family began in 1968 when Jeanne’s father sent her
to Brooklyn, New York, to go to high school. The single plus sign for 1968