Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis II: Models and Matrices 529
TABLE 18.2
Young and Garro’s Decision Table Showing How Pichatareños Choose a Method of
Treating an Illness When Their First Choice Doesn’t Work
Rules: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Conditions
preceding choice a ST ST ST ST C-P C-P C P Dr Dr Dr
current gravity b 1–2 3 3 1 2–3 2–3 2–3
faith c F M M (M) M
accessibility d N Y Y N N N Y
Choices
self-treatment
X
curer X X X X
practicante X X X
physician X X X
a. ST self-treatment, C curer, P practicante, Dr physician
b. 1 nonserious, 2 moderately serious, 3 grave
c. F favors folk treatment, M favors medical treatment
d. Y money and transportation available, N either money or transportation not currently available
SOURCE: Reprinted by permission of Waveland Press, Inc., from J. C. Young and L. C. Garro, Medical Choice
in a Mexican Village, 1981 (reissued 1994), p. 154. All rights reserved.
physicians are commonly thought not to be effective, apply rule number 7 and
go to a curer. The blank spaces in the top part of table 18.1 indicate irrelevant
conditions. In rule number 1, for example, there is no question about accessibility
for home remedies because they cost little or nothing and everyone has
access to them.
Sometimes the treatment selected for an illness doesn’t work and another
decision has to be made. Table 18.2, with 11 decision rules, shows Young and
Garro’s analysis of this second stage of decision making. Their entire twostage
model is based on their sense of emerging patterns in the data they collected
about decision making. The question, of course, is: Does it work?
Young and Garro tested their model against 444 treatment choices gathered
from 62 households over a 6-month period. To make the test fair, none of the
informants in the test were among those whose data were used in developing
the model. Table 18.3 shows the results of the test. There were 157 cases covered
by rule number 1 from table 18.1 (first-stage decision), and in every single
case informants did what the rule predicted. In table 18.3, errors (informants’
choices that are not predicted by the model) are in parentheses, so
informants did what rule number 6 predicted 20 out of 29 times.
Overall, for the first stage, Young and Garro’s decision rules predict about
94% of informants’ reported behavior. After removing the cases covered by