Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

66 Chapter 2
beliefs about what lives should look like. What’s a successful life? This differs
from culture to culture, but in many cultures, the list of things that indicate
success is widely shared. Dressler and his colleagues have found that people
who have more of these things (whose lives are in consonance with the cultural
model) have lower stress and fewer blood pressure problems than do people
whose lives lack cultural consonance (Dressler et al. 1997, 2002; Dressler,
Ribeiro et al. 2004, and see chapter 8 on measuring cultural consensus).
In relative deprivation theory, the fact that people have reference groups to
which they compare themselves doesn’t get explained, either. It, too, is a primitive
axiom, an assumption, from which you deduce some results. The results
are predictions, or hypotheses, that you then go out and test. The ideal in science
is to deduce a prediction from theory and to test the prediction. That’s
the culture of science. The way social science really works much of the time
is that you don’t predict results, you postdict them. You analyze your data,
come up with findings, and explain the findings after the fact.
There is nothing wrong with this. Knowledge and understanding can come
from good ideas before you collect data or after you collect data. You must
admit, though, there’s a certain panache in making a prediction, sealing it in
an envelope, and testing it. Later, when you take the prediction out of the
envelope and it matches your empirical findings, you get a lot of points.
The Kalymnian Case
Here’s an example of explaining findings after the fact. In my experience,
it’s pretty typical of how social scientists develop, refine, and change their
minds about theories.
In my fieldwork in 1964–1965 on the island of Kalymnos, Greece, I noticed
that young sponge divers (in their 20s) were more likely to get the bends than
were older divers (those over 30). (The bends is a crippling malady that affects
divers who come up too quickly after a long time in deep water.) I also noticed
that younger divers were more productive than very old divers (those over 45),
but not more productive than those in their middle years (30–40).
As it turned out, younger divers were subject to much greater social stress
to demonstrate their daring and to take risks with their lives—risks that men
over 30 had already put behind them. The younger divers worked longer under
water (gathering more sponges), but they came up faster and were consequently
at higher risk of bends. The middle group of divers made up in experience
for the shortened time they spent in the water, so they maintained their
high productivity at lower risk of bends. The older divers were feeling the