Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

46 Chapter 2
This operationalization of the variable ‘‘religious affiliation’’ has two
important characteristics: It is exhaustive and mutually exclusive. The famous
‘‘other’’ category in nominal variables makes the list exhaustive—that is, all
possible categories have been named in the list—and the instruction to ‘‘check
one’’ makes the list mutually exclusive. (More on this in chapter 10 when we
discuss questionnaire design.)
‘‘Mutually exclusive’’ means that things can’t belong to more than one category
of a nominal variable at a time. We assume, for example, that people who
say they are Catholic generally don’t say they are Moslem. I say ‘‘generally’’
because life is complicated and variables that seem mutually exclusive may
not be. Some citizens of Lebanon have one Catholic and one Moslem parent
and may think of themselves as both Moslem and Catholic.
Most people think of themselves as either male or female, but not everyone
does. The prevalence of transsexuals in human populations is not known precisely,
but worldwide, it is likely to be between one in ten thousand and one in
a hundred thousand for male-to-female transsexuals (biological males whose
gender identity is female) and between one in a hundred thousand and one in
four hundred thousand for female-to-male transsexuals (Cohen-Kettenis and
Gooren 1999).
Most people think of themselves as a member of one so-called race or
another, but more and more people think of themselves as belonging to two or
more races. In 2000, the U.S. Census offered people the opportunity to check
off more than one race from six choices: White, Black or African American,
American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific
islander, and some other race. Nearly seven million people (2.4% of the 281
million in the United States in 2000) checked more than one of the six options
(Grieco and Cassidy 2001).
And when it comes to ethnicity, the requirement for mutual exclusivity is
just hopeless. There are Chicano African Americans, Chinese Cuban Americans,
Filipino Cherokees, and so on. This just reflects the complexity of real
life, but it does make analyzing data more complicated since each combination
of attributes has to be treated as a separate category of the variable ‘‘ethnicity’’
or collapsed into one of the larger categories. More about this in chapters
19 and 20, when we get to data analysis.
Occupation is a nominal variable, but lots of people have more than one
occupation. People can be peasant farmers and makers of fireworks displays
for festivals; they can be herbalists and jewelers; or they can be pediatric
oncology nurses and antique car salespeople at the same time. A list of occupations
is a measuring instrument at the nominal level: You hold each person
up against the list and see which occupation(s) he or she has (have).
Nominal measurement—naming things—is qualitative measurement.