Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

36 Chapter 2
and decide which value to record. If you use secondary sexual characteristics
as an indicator of gender, then to measure gender you look at a person and
decide whether they are female or male.
In other words, measurement is deciding which value to record. That decision
is prone to error. Some people whom you classify as white or black might
be classified as black or white by another observer. And gender is even worse.
Many people, both men and women, have ambiguous secondary sexual characteristics
and many women wear what were once considered to be men’s
clothes. Is Pat a man’s name or a woman’s? What about Chris? Leslie? Any
of these indicators may lead you into making the wrong measurement—
marking down a man or boy as a woman or girl, or vice versa.
Improving measurement in science means lowering the probability of and
the amount of error. Light-skinned African Americans who cease to identify
themselves ethnically as black persons count on those errors for what they
hope will be upward economic mobility. Dark-skinned ‘‘Whites,’’ like some
Americans of Mediterranean descent, sometimes complain that they are being
‘‘mistaken for’’ Blacks and discriminated against.
Race and gender are concepts or constructs. We have to make them up to
study them. All variables are concepts, but some concepts, like height and
weight, are easy to measure, while other concepts like religious intensity, jealousy,
compassion, willingness to accept new agricultural technologies, and
tolerance for foreign fieldwork are complex and difficult to measure.
We are led to defining constructs by our experience: Some people just seem
more religiously intense than others, more jealous than others, more tolerant
of foreign fieldwork than others, etc. We verify our intuition about conceptual
variables by measuring them, or by measuring their results.
Suppose you put an ad in the paper that says: ‘‘Roommate wanted. Easygoing,
nonsmoker preferred.’’ When people answer the ad you can look at
their fingers and smell their clothes to see if they smoke. But you have to ask
people a series of indicator questions to gauge their easy-goingness.
Similarly, if you are doing fieldwork in a Peruvian highland village, and
you want to predict who among the villagers is predisposed to migrate to the
coast in search of work, you will want to measure that predisposition with a
series of indicators. In this case, the indicators can be answers to questions
(‘‘Have you ever thought about migrating?’’). Or they might be observable
facts (Does a person have a close relative who has already migrated?). Or they
might be a combination of these.
It may be easier to measure some concepts than others, but the fact is, all
measurement is difficult. People have worked for centuries to develop good
instruments for measuring things like temperature. And if it’s difficult to measure
temperature (a concept, after all, backed up by time-tested theories), how