Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 519
Levinson (1989) did the research for his book on this topic, he asked the coders
at HRAF how they would code it. They said that they would classify family
violence under code 593 (family relations) or code 578 (in-group antagonisms).
Levinson scoured the HRAF for references to those codes, and did, in fact,
find a lot of material. He coded whether or not a society was reported to
exhibit family violence, what kind of violence was reported (child abuse,
abuse of the elderly, etc.), and how severe the violence was. Later, while he
was browsing through the files, Levinson noticed that wife beating—clearly,
a form of family violence—was usually coded under 684, sex and marital
offenses. Wife beating, it turns out, is reported for many societies only in
cases of adultery or suspicion of adultery, and hence, under code 684 (Levinson,
personal communication). The lesson for conducting cross-cultural
research is pretty clear: There is no substitute for reading the ethnographies
and looking for new clues on how to code variables.
There is also no substitute for good data. The quality of ethnographic data
depends crucially on the skill of the person who collected and recorded those
data. Ethnographers may be biased in recording their data. Even if they are
not biased, they may have the misfortune to interview incompetent informants—or
even people who just lied. Raoul Naroll discussed these and other
problems in a pioneering work in 1962. Since then, cross-cultural researchers
have done many studies on data quality control (see Rohner et al. 1973; Levinson
1978).
William Divale (1976), for example, tested the long-standing idea that
women have higher status as societal complexity increases. He correlated two
independent measures of female status with societal complexity across a representative
sample of cultures and found—against all expectations—that the
higher the complexity of the society, the lower the status of women.
Divale recalculated the correlation using only ethnographies written by people
who had spent at least a year in the field and who spoke the native language
fluently. When he did this, he found high female status reported at all
levels of societal complexity, with low status reported primarily among lesscomplex
societies. The unexpected relation between female status and societal
complexity vanished.
Computers and Text Analysis
Anyone who collects mountains of text will want to take advantage of modern
text analysis software. Don’t take the phrase ‘‘text analysis software’’ literally.
Computer programs do a lot, but in the end, you do the analysis; you