Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis II: Models and Matrices 547
Failure is predicted even better: If an actor has failed in the Chen Village
disputes, then he or she is of rural origin (comes from the village) OR comes
from a nonproletarian family AND has no ties to authorities beyond the village.
The Boolean formula for this statement is:
Lack of success V v nonurban (nonproletarian and lack of ties)
The substantive conclusions from this analysis are intuitively appealing: In
a communist revolutionary environment, it pays over the years to have friends
in high places; people from urban areas are more likely to have those ties; and
it helps to have been born into a politically correct (that is, proletarian) family.
Analytic induction helps identify the simplest model that logically explains
the data. Like classic content analysis and cognitive mapping, human coders
have to read and code the text into an event-by-variable matrix. The object of
the analysis, however, is not to show the relations between all codes, but to
find the minimal set of logical relations among the concepts that accounts for
a single dependent variable.
With three binary independent variables (as in Schweizer’s data), two logical
operators (OR and AND), and three implications (‘‘if A then B,’’ ‘‘if B
then A,’’ and ‘‘if A, then and only then, B’’), there are 30 multivariate hypotheses:
18 when all three independent variables are used, plus 12 when two variables
are used. With more variables, the analysis becomes much more difficult,
but there are now computer programs, like Tosmana and Anthropac
(Borgatti 1992a, 1992b), that test all possible multivariate hypotheses and find
the optimal solution (see appendix F).
Here are the details of the Boolean logic of Schweizer’s analysis (Schweizer
1996). Three possible hypotheses can be derived from two binary variables:
‘‘If A then B,’’ ‘‘If B then A,’’ and ‘‘If A, then and only then, B.’’ In the first
hypothesis, A is a sufficient condition to B and B is necessary to A. This
hypothesis is falsified by all cases having A and not B. In the second hypothesis,
B is a sufficient condition to A and A is necessary to B. The second
hypothesis is falsified by all cases of B and not A. These two hypotheses are
implications or conditional statements. The third hypothesis (an equivalence
or biconditional statement) is the strongest: Whenever you see A, you
also see B and vice versa; the absence of A implies the absence of B and vice
versa. This hypothesis is falsified by all cases of A and not B, and all cases of
B and not A.
Applied to the data from Chen Village, the strong hypothesis is falsified
by many cases, but the sufficient condition hypotheses (urban origin implies
success; proletarian background implies success; having external ties implies
success) are true in 86% of the cases (this is an average of the three sufficient
condition hypotheses). The necessary condition hypotheses (success implies