Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

524 Chapter 18
Do you always go to class?
Yes
No
Were you sick
this morning?
Yes
No
Don't go to class
Go to class
Figure 18.1. An ethnographic decision model after interviewing one informant
(Alex).
you always go to class?’’ Sheila says that she sometimes skips early classes if
those classes are really easy and she needs to study for an exam in another
class later in the day. Ask her: ‘‘Were you sick this morning?’’ If she says,
‘‘no,’’ draw the diagram in figure 18.2.
Your third respondent, Brad, says that no, he didn’t go to class this morning;
no, he doesn’t always go to class; yes, he skips class when he’s sick; no, he
wasn’t sick this morning; no, he didn’t have an exam later in the day; no, his
8 a.m. class isn’t tough; but he was out very late last night and just didn’t feel
like going to class this morning. Figure 18.3 combines all the information we
have for Alex, Sheila, and Brad.
In fact, we don’t know if Sheila was out late last night, and if she had been,
whether that would have affected her decision to go to class early this morning.
We can find out by going back and asking Sheila the new question. We
could also go back and ask Alex if he had an exam later in the day and if he’d
been out late last night.
But we won’t. In practice, it is very difficult to go back to informants and
ask them all the questions you accumulate from EDM interviews. Instead, the
usual practice is to build a composite diagram, like the one in figure 18.3, and
push on. We also won’t ask Brad what he would have done if he’d had a really
tough 8:00 a.m. class and had been out late the night before. In building
EDMs, we deal only with people’s reports of their actual, most recent
behavior.
Eventually, you’ll stop getting new decisions, reasons, and constraints.
Building a model for the decision on a single campus to attend or not attend