Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

678 Chapter 21
sign, plus or minus), you look at the list and decide what the factor means.An
example should make all this a lot clearer.
Handwerker’s Domestic Activities Scale
Penn Handwerker (1996a, 1998) used factor analysis to test whether the
construct of ‘‘domestic cooperation’’ on Barbados was unidimensional. He
asked a random sample of 428 Barbadian women whether their husband or
boyfriend helped with any of the following: cooking, washing clothes, washing
dishes, bathing children, taking children places, and caring for children. To
put these items of domestic cooperation in context, he also asked each woman
whether her husband or boyfriend was expected to treat her as an equal and
whether her husband or boyfriend did, in fact, treat her as an equal.
Table 21.22 is a schematic of Handwerker’s data matrix. The eight variables
are labeled COOK, WASH, DISH, BATHE, TAKE, CARE, EQUAL1, and
EQUAL2.
TABLE 21.22
Schematic of Handwerker’s Profile Matrix
ID COOK WASH DISH BATH TAKE CARE EQUAL1 EQUAL2
1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0
2 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1
3 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0
.
.
.
438 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1
SOURCE: W. P. Handwerker, adapted from ‘‘Constructing Likert Scales: Testing the Validity and Reliability
of Single Measures of Multidimensional Variables,’’ Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, Vol. 8, no. 1, p.
2, 1996a. Reprinted by Permission of Sage Publications.
Table 21.22 is a profile matrix (see figure 16.1a), but factor analysis is done
on a similarity matrix (see figure 16.1b). If Handwerker had asked the women:
‘‘On a scale of 1–5, how much does your husband or boyfriend help you with
the cooking,’’ the entries in table 21.22 would have been 1–5. With that kind
of data, a factor analysis program would turn the profile matrix into a similarity
matrix by calculating Pearson’s r for all possible pairs of columns. But
Handwerker asked the women Yes/No questions (that’s why table 21.22 contains
only 0s and 1s).
One way to turn a 1/0 profile matrix into a similarity matrix is to calculate
the percentage of matches for all possible pairs of columns. That is, when two