Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis II: Models and Matrices 527
late last night? and so on, exhausting all the questions from your model. If
your model works, you’ll be able to predict the decisions of the second group
from their answers to the model’s questions.
Representing Complicated Models with Tables
and IF-THEN Charts
Young and Garro’s EDM: Decision Tables
James Young and Linda Garro studied how Tarascan people in Pichátaro,
Mexico, choose one of four ways to treat an illness: Use a home remedy, go to
a native curer, see a practicante (a local, nonphysician practitioner of modern
medicine), or go to a physician (see Young 1980; Young and Garro 1982, 1994
[1981]; Garro 1986). From their ethnographic work, Young and Garro
believed that the decision to use one or another of these treatments depended
on four factors:
1. how serious an illness was perceived to be (gravity);
2. whether a home remedy for the illness was known;
3. whether the informant had confidence in the general efficacy of a mode of treatment
for a particular illness; and
4. the accessibility (in terms of cost and transportation) of a particular mode of
treatment.
The choice situations emerged from structured interviews with eight men
and seven women who were asked:
If you or another person in your household were ill, when—for what reasons—
would you [consult] [use] instead of [consulting]
[using] ? (Young and Garro 1994 [1981]:132)
Young and Garro used this question frame to elicit responses about all six
possible pairs of treatment alternatives: home remedy vs. a physician, curer
vs. home remedy, and so on. To check the validity of the statements made in
the interviews, Young and Garro collected case histories of actual illnesses
and their treatments from each of the 15 informants.
Next, the researchers completed interviews with 20 informants using a
series of ‘‘What if . . .’’ questions to generate decisions, under various combinations
of circumstances, regarding the selection of treatments for illnesses.
For example, informants were asked:
Let’s say there is a person who has a very grave illness. In this family, money is
scarce—sure, they’re eating, but there is just not anything left over. They have