Ethnographic Free-List Data: Management and Analysis With Examples in R(Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences)

This method involves research participants listing what they know or think about the researcher’s topic of interest. While researchers typically report these free-list analyses in isolation, this book incorporates them with other analytical methods and demonstrates how ethnographic free-lists and the study of cultural models can be useful to a broad social science audience. The first half of the book covers descriptive methods, and the second half incorporates insights from the early chapters into a predictive statistical framework. The author explains how to collect, clean, and manage free-list data and how to use R to analyze and visualize the data.

Table of Contents:
Series Editor Introduction Preface Acknowledgments About the Author Chapter 1: Introduction What Is a Free-List? Why Free-List? Getting to Work Data Management Chapter 2: Content Analysis Background Frequency Analysis Salience Analysis Salience Revisited Further Methods in Content Analysis Summary Chapter 3: Structure Analysis Examining Conceptual Relationships Two Case Studies Conceptual Networks Further Methods in Structure Analysis Chapter 4: Overlap and Sharedness Conceptual Overlap Across Domains Intragroup Sharing and Variation Intergroup Sharing and Variation Summary and Closing Note Chapter 5: Models, Prediction, and Uncertainty The Arithmetic Mean as a Model Primer on Regression Bayesian Regression Chapter 6: Free-List Data in Regression Thinking Through the System Predicting List Lengths Predicting Item Presence Predicting Salience Multilevel Models Using Individual Free-Lists to Predict Behavior Concluding Remarks Chapter 7: Future Prospects Culture, Text, and Content Cognition, Culture, and Society Culture Evolving References Index

About the Author :
Benjamin Grant Purzycki is Associate Professor at Aarhus University’s Department of the Study of Religion. A cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist by training, he merges experimental and ethnographic methods together to make better sense of religious systems’ utility for human adaptation. He has conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic (Russia) and managed large cross-cultural projects. He co-developed AnthroTools (with Alastair Jamieson-Lane), a software package for analyzing ethnographic data in R and has published in a wide range of journals including Current Anthropology, Cognition, Cognitive Science, Nature, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and Psychological Methods. His books include Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics (with Richard Sosis, Equinox), The Minds of Gods: New Horizons in the Naturalistic Study of Religion (with Theiss Bendixen, Bloomsbury), the two-volume Evolution of Religion and Morality project (with Martin Lang, Joseph Henrich, and Ara Norenzayan, Routledge), and Morality and the Gods (Cambridge University Press).

Review :
An innovative research methods book that provides a step-by-step guide to the popular R software. Researchers of any social scientific discipline will benefit tremendously from procedural knowledge in transforming conventionally qualitative data into quantitative reasoning.