Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Foundations of Social Research 39
although there can be no objective definition of middle age, we can at least
agree on what we mean by ‘‘middle age’’ for a particular study and on how to
measure the concept.
Complex variables are conceptually defined by reducing them to a series of
simpler variables. Saying that ‘‘the people in this village are highly acculturated’’
can be interpreted in many ways. But if you state clearly that you
include ‘‘being bilingual,’’ ‘‘working in the national economy,’’ and ‘‘going to
school’’ in your conceptual definition of acculturation, then at least others will
understand what you’re talking about when you say that people are ‘‘highly
acculturated.’’
Similarly, ‘‘machismo’’ might be characterized by ‘‘a general feeling of
male superiority,’’ accompanied by ‘‘insecure behavior in relationships with
women.’’ Intelligence might be conceptually defined as ‘‘the ability to think in
abstractions and to generalize from cases.’’ These definitions have something
important in common: They have no external reality against which to test their
truth value.
Conceptual definitions are at their most powerful when they are linked
together to build theories that explain research results. When the United
Nations was founded in 1945, the hope was that trade between industrialized
and nonindustrialized countries of the world would result in economic development
for everyone. The economies of the developed countries would
expand and the benefits of an expanding economy would be seen in the underdeveloped
countries. A decade later, it was obvious that this wasn’t what was
happening. The rich countries were getting richer and the poor countries were
getting poorer.
Raul Prebisch, an Argentinian economist who worked at the UN, argued
that under colonialism, rich countries were importing raw materials from poor
countries to produce manufactured goods and that poor countries had come to
depend economically on the rich countries. Prebisch’s ‘‘dependency theory’’
links the concept of ‘‘control of capital’’ with those of ‘‘mutual security’’ and
‘‘economic dependency,’’ and the linkage helps explain why economic development
often results in some groups winding up with less access to capital
than they had before a development program (Prebisch 1984, 1994).
Conceptual definitions are at their weakest in the conduct of research itself,
because concepts have no empirical basis—we have to make them up to study
them.
There is nothing wrong with this. There are three things one wants to do in
any science: (1) describe a phenomenon of interest; (2) explain what causes
it; and (3) predict what it causes. The existence of a conceptual variable is
inferred from what it predicts—how well it makes theoretical sense out of a
lot of data.