Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

516 Chapter 17
Doing Cross-Cultural Text-Based Research
There are five steps in doing an HRAF study (Otterbein 1969):
1. State a hypothesis that requires cross-cultural data.
2. Draw a representative sample of the world’s cultures.
3. Find the appropriate OCM codes in the sample.
4. Code the variables according to whatever conceptual scheme you’ve developed
in forming your hypothesis.
5. Run the appropriate statistical tests and see if your hypothesis is confirmed.
Sampling and Galton’s Problem
In 1889, Edward Tylor gave a paper at the Royal Society in London in
which he tried to relate, among other things, marital residence (matrilocal, patrilocal,
etc.) to customs of kin avoidance. Francis Galton, asked: ‘‘Weren’t
some of the societies that Mr. Tylor was using in his analysis related to one
another? Wouldn’t that negate using them each as an independent example of
the same variable?’’
This became known as Galton’s Problem. One way to deal with it is to use
the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of 186 societies (Murdock and White
1969) or the HRAF Probability Sample of 60 societies (HRAF 1967) as your
sample. These samples were developed so that the societies would be independent
of one another, linguistically and culturally.
Another way is to treat the relation between pairs of societies as an independent
variable—that is, to measure how close they are linguistically, culturally,
or geographically—and to use that variable as a predictor of whatever hypothesis
you’re testing (Dow et al. 1984).
Or you can, as Carol and Melvin Ember suggest (2001:89), choose a simple
random sample from the societies that are currently described in the HRAF
archives. If you choose 60 societies samples at random, you can run your test
on 30 of them and then compare your results to the other 30. If you get the
same answers twice, you can be much more confident about them than if you
get them just once.
Coding
If a piece of an ethnography is coded as 682, this means that it is about
offenses against life. It does not tell you what the offense is. It may be killing
someone by accidentally setting fire to their house; it may be paying a sorcerer
to cast a deadly spell on someone who subsequently dies; it may be a revenge
or honor killing; or it may be an inappropriate act in battle. The only way to