Anthropology 3004          Boster           Fall 2008

Cultural Research: Practicum in Linguistic Anthropology

        This course is an introduction to techniques of collecting and analyzing anthropological data, with a focus on linguistic and psychological anthropology.  The methods used to collect the data include similarity judgment and frame substitution tasks while the methods used to analyze the data include factor analysis (consensus analysis), correspondence analysis, analysis of variance, quadratic assignment, cluster analysis, and multidimensional scaling. Most of the methods of data analysis are implemented by PASCAL programs I have written, so that we will have a way of directly examining how the analysis is performed. Our goal is to give members of the class hands-on experience using a variety of methods of collecting anthropological data and a variety of multivariate methods to analyze the resulting datasets.  The class will meet Monday afternoons from 3:00 PM to 3:50 PM in Beach Hall Room 439 (my office). My office hours will be held Wednesday from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM, and by appointment.My email address is james.boster@uconn.edu and my telephone is 486-2795.

Schedule of Topics

Week 3: (Sep. 8) Orientation.

This week will offer an overview of the topics that we will take up in the rest of the class and introduce students to some of the basic concepts used throughout the rest of the class. We will discuss the basic form of the data matrices we will study through the rest of the term -- item*attribute*cultural group*individual. Week 4: (Sep. 15) Data Collection: Procedures. This week will review the methods we will use.   The methods include freelisting, the successive pile sort, and belief frames. Weeks 5, 6, 7: (Sep. 22 & 29, Oct. 6) Data Collection: Practice. These weeks will involve using the instruments developed in week 4 to collect.

Week 8: (Oct. 13) Data Analysis: Programs.

This week will introduce the computer programs we will use through the rest of the class. These include commercial software such as SYSTAT, EXCEL, and TextPad and Pascal (DELPHI) programs I have written such as SPS (Successive Pile Sort), FRAME (Belief Frame Analysis), MAKEMOD (for making models of hypothesized patterns of similarity), CORR (Pearson Correlations), and QAP (Quadratic Assignment Program). Some programs use subroutines developed by Nash (1990) such as CA (Correspondence Analysis) and CC (Consensus Analysis). Weeks 9, 10, 11, 12: (Oct. 20 & 27, Nov. 3 & 10) Data Analysis: Practice.
These weeks will begin the analysis of the data we have collected. The successive pile sort elicits from informants a complete binary tree of the relationships among all of the items sorted. In this case, the basic data are matrices expressing the similarity of items as judged by each of the individuals -- item*item*individual. We will use MDS and cluster analysis to represent the aggregate structure. Factor analysis (consensus analysis) will be used to examine patterns of agreement among informants. Programs: SPS, SYSTAT (MDS, cluster analysis), CA, QAP, CC.  Each multivariate technique used in the class will be introduced with a brief description and a discussion of the kinds of problems for which the technique is useful. 
Week 15: (Dec. 1) Conclusion.