Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

50 Chapter 2
hypotheses requires many units of analysis, usually a sample from a large population—Navajos,
Chicano migrants, Yanomami warriors, women in trade
unions in Rio de Janeiro, runaway children who live on the street, people who
go to chiropractors, Hispanic patrol officers in the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service who work on the border between the United States and
Mexico.
Although most research in social science is about populations of people,
many other things can be the units of analysis. You can focus on farms instead
of farmers, or on unions instead of union members, or on wars instead of warriors.
You can study marriage contracts; folk tales, songs, and myths; and
countries, cultures, and cities.
Paul Doughty (1979), for example, surveyed demographic data on 134
countries in order to make a list of ‘‘primate cities.’’ Geographers say that a
country has a primate city if its most populous city is at least twice the size of
its second-most populous city. Doughty, an anthropologist who had worked
in Peru, looked at the population of the three largest cities in each country and
coded whether the largest city was at least three times greater than the second
and third cities combined. He discovered that this extreme form of population
concentration was associated with Latin America more than with any other
region of the world at the time.
Holly Mathews (1985) did a study of how men and women in a Mexican
village tell a famous folktale differently. The tale is called La Llorona (The
Weeping Woman) and is known all over Mexico. Mathews’s research has to
do with the problem of intracultural variation—different people telling the
same story in different ways. She studied a sample of the population of La
Llorona stories in a community where she was working. Each story, as told
by a different person, had characteristics that could be compared across the
sample of stories. One of the characteristics was whether the story was told
by a man or by a woman, and this turned out to be the most important variable
associated with the stories, which were the units of analysis. (See the section
on schema analysis in chapter 17 for more about Mathews’s study of the La
Llorona tales.)
You can have more than one unit of analysis in a study. When Mathews
looked for similarities and differences in tellings of the story, then the stories
were the units of analysis. But when she looked at patterns in the tellers of the
stories, then people were her units of analysis.
Robert Aunger (2004:145–162) asked 424 people in four ethnic groups
(Sudanic, Efe, Bantu, and Tswa) in the Ituri Forest (Democratic Republic of
Congo) about food taboos. For each of 145 animals, Augner asked each informant
if it was edible, and if so, if there were any times when it should not be
eaten. For example, some animals were said to be off limits to pregnant