Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Bivariate Analysis: Testing Relations 607
color (which is, at bottom, what the so-called race variable is about in the
United States) depends on whether they are a member of a two-parent or a
one-parent family.
And clearly—and I mean absolutely, positively, no-fooling, clearly—being
black did not cause anyone, not one single person, to be part of a single-parent
household. Being a black man in the United States, however, means a high
probability of attending poorly funded schools, and poor schooling produces
severe disadvantage in the labor market. When men in the United States don’t
provide financial support, poor women—who have even worse prospects than
men do for finding stable, well-paying jobs—are likely to turn to welfare.
Historically, welfare systems have punished women who have a live-in husband
by lowering the women’s allotments. Some women responded by maintaining
single-parent households and some fraction of African American, single-parent
families was, in 1997, caused by this sequence of events. There are,
then, several intervening and antecedent variables that link being counted
as black by the U.S. Census and being part of a single-parent household. (See
figure 2.4 about intervening and antecedent variables.)
Some of the most interesting puzzles about human life involve understanding
the role of intervening and antecedent variables—and figuring out which
is which. Middle-aged men who drink at least six cups of coffee a day are
more likely to have a heart attack than are men who don’t drink coffee at all.
Men who drink a lot of coffee, however, consume more alcohol, more saturated
fats, and more cholesterol than men who don’t drink coffee. The heavy
coffee drinkers are less likely to exercise, more likely to smoke, and more
likely to be impatient, aggravated people (the famous Type A personality).
The jury is still out on how all these factors are related, but lots of researchers
are trying to disentangle this problem (Puccio et al. 1990; Ketterer and Maercklein
1991; Schwarz et al. 1994; James 1997). (Women’s chances of coronary
disease are unaffected by drinking lots of coffee [Willett et al. 1996].)
Here’s another one. Interethnic marriage often increases when tribal peoples
move from rural villages to cities. One effect of this is that unilineal systems
are under pressure to become bilateral over time (see Feldman 1994;
Clignet 1966). Is it just the lack of prospective mates from one’s own ethnic
group that causes this? Or is there something inherently unstable about unilineal
kinship systems under urban conditions?
Lambda and the PRE Principle
Table 20.5 is a hypothetical 2 2 table showing the breakdown, by gender,
of adult monolingual Indians and adult bilingual Indian/Spanish speakers in a