Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 515
It also depends on what’s at stake. X-rays are texts, after all, and I’d like a
pretty high level of intercoder agreement if a group of physicians were deciding
on whether a particular anomaly meant my going in for surgery or not. In
text analysis, the standards are still evolving. Many researchers are satisfied
with kappa values of around .70; others like to shoot for .80 and higher (Krippendorf
1980; Gottschalk and Bechtel 1993).
HRAF: Cross-Cultural Content Analysis
In the 1940s, George Peter Murdock, Clellan S. Ford, and other behavioral
scientists at Yale led the effort to organize an interuniversity, nonprofit organization
that is now the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University.
HRAF is the world’s largest archive of ethnography, with about a million
pages of text, collected from more than 7,800 books and articles, on over 400
cultural groups around the world. The archive is growing at about 40,000
pages a year, and about 40% of the material is now available around the world
via the Internet through libraries at institutions that subscribe. (Go to: http://
www.yale.edu/hraf/.)
Pages of the HRAF database are indexed by professional anthropologists,
following the Outline of Cultural Materials, or OCM. This is a massive indexing
system that was developed by Murdock and others (2004 [1961]) to organize
and classify material about cultures and societies of the world. The OCM
is used by cross-cultural researchers to find ethnographic data for testing
hypotheses about human behavior across cultures. (Some anthropologists use
it to code their field notes; see chapter 14.)
There are 82 main domains in the OCM, in blocks of 10, from 10 to 91.
Block 16, for example, is about demography. Within this block there are eight
subdomains labeled 1611, 1622, . . . 168. These domains cover specific topics
like mortality (code 165), external migration (code 167), and so on. Block 58
covers the family with codes for nuptials (585), termination of marriage (586),
etc. Other major blocks of codes are for domains like kinship, entertainment,
social stratification, war, health and welfare, sickness, sex, religious
practices. . . .
HRAF turns the ethnographic literature into a database for content analysis
and cross-cultural tests of hypotheses because you can search the archive for
every reference to any of the codes across the more than 400 cultures that are
covered.