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FRIDAY HISTORICAL READINGS
Oct 10: Pioneers
Oct 17: Expertise
Oct 24: Cliffords
Oct 31: Danger
Nov 7: El Dorado
Nov 14: Emotions
Nov 21: Natives
M Dec 1: Assistants
Dec 5: Summary
MONDAY EXERCISES
Sep 29: Experience
Oct 6: Observation
Oct 13: Interview
Oct 20: Discomfort
Oct 27: Formal
Nov 3: Survey
Nov 10: Photo
Nov 17: Video
Nov 24: Digital
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Your sixth class exercise is due for today. It concerns survey research. Although surveys are customarily associated with sociology, demography, and more explicitly quantitative social sciences, cultural anthropologists also use surveys, though often in ways particular to the discipline: as an adjunct to more classical ethnographic methods such as observation and interviewing, rather than as the primary instrument of a research project.
Your assignment is to design and pilot a small survey:
- Formulate a series of questions that can be answered discretely (yes/no, a series of choices, Likert Scale, etc)
Determine a sample size. Most often, you will need expert help to do this, but at least guess how many you might need. You will not have time in this short exercise to actually give the survey to enough people.
- Pilot the survey: give it to about 5 people, and see which of your questions turn out to elicit appropriate answers, and which ones need to be revised.
- Revise needed questions accordingly.
- By 9:00 a.m on the day of class, post an explanation on why some of your questions did not produce expected results, and how you revised them. Also comment on whether you think surveys might be useful for your planned dissertation research.
In preparation for this exercise, read the following:
- Chapters 6 and 7 Questions and Answers and Refining the Questions, from Bill Gillham, Small-Scale Social Survey Methods
- Chapter 7, Questions and Answers in Surveys, from Robert M. Groves, et al., Survey Methodology. n.b. This is available online, but they jimmy the eBooks so there is no permanent link. So you'll have to go to the UW Libraries online catalogue and get to it from there.
- Chapter 3, Sampling, from Howard S. Becker, Tricks of the Trade
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