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Dear Qual and Quant

December 2003
David Kennedy and Lance Gravlee



Copyright ©2003 Chris Suddick. Reprinted with permission.


This column first appeared in Anthropology News 44(9) and is reprinted here with permission. Do you have a question you'd like to have answered in future columns? Write Qual and Quant at help@qualquant.net.

Last January, AN published the first installment of our advice column, which we hope will help graduate students deal with some of the many practical challenges we faced in recently completing our degrees. Apparently, the problems we addressed struck a chord, because many readers have contacted us for further advice. Here we follow-up on some of the most pressing issues. We invite readers to send us their comments and questions to help@qualquant.net (yes, we are serious) or via www.qualquant.net.

On Conducting Fieldwork

Dear Qual and Quant,

I am very lucky to have a world-renowned dissertation advisor. He is known and respected throughout anthropology for his ethnographies and has been influential in the field for his theoretical developments. I am in awe of his accomplishments and only hope to contribute a fraction of what he has contributed to anthropology. However, when I started asking him specific, practical questions about how to conduct fieldwork, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he just held up a pen and piece of paper and handed them to me. I guess this was some sort of symbolic gesture to tell me that I have to take lots of notes. I wasn’t sure what to do when he did this, so I just took the pen and paper, thanked him, and left his office. I’m still confused, however, and I still feel at a loss about how to approach my fieldwork. What should I have done?

—Awed in Alabama

Dear Awed,

You should have taken the pen and paper and written “I need a new advisor who will train me to conduct research.”

The Ethnographer's Task

Dear Qual and Quant,

I have a question that I hope you can answer. If the premise of cultural discourse holds that reality is capable of truth then, in a sense, the subject is interpolated into a Batailleist “powerful communication’’ that includes sexuality as a reality. However, the subdialectic capitalist theory suggests that the task of the ethnographer is creating significant form but only if narrativity is interchangeable with language. My question is, in cultural discourse, do we have to choose between the neocapitalist paradigm of consensus and dialectic poststructural theory? Also, is there a choice between rejecting neodialectic deappropriation and concluding that reality comes from the collective unconscious?

—Neo-nihilist in Nashville

Dear Nihilly,

You would be surprised how often we get this question. One solution is to test this with a series of competing structural equation models, defining your latent variables as some combination of “consensus,” “deappropriation,” “narrativity,” and “sexuality.” The measurement model would consist of multiple operationalizations of the theoretical constructs using constructed scales tested for reliability and validity. Because these scales will likely consist of mainly ordered response variables, be sure to calculate polychoric correlations and an asymptotic covariance matrix for use with a weighted least squares estimator. Many multivariate statistical packages have incorporated imputation methods for missing data, so give that a try. Also, check for bivariate normality and see if there are some variables that should be eliminated from the overall analysis. Depending on your sample size you may want to conduct exploratory factor analyses for latent variables to develop sub-scales for use in the overall model. Of course this will depend on the number of bivariate contingency table cells that have 0 values (but you probably already knew that). Good luck! Let us know how it turns out.

On Meeting Exhaustion

Dear Qual and Quant,

I recently went to my first AAA Annual Meeting. I was so excited when I read through the program and saw so many exciting sessions with such attention grabbing titles! I tried to go to as many sessions as possible. By Sunday, I was exhausted. I ended up going to 18 sessions in all! However, my problem is this. I didn’t understand anything that any of the presenters were talking about. Am I an idiot?

—Exhausted in Evanston

Dear Exhaust,

Are you an idiot? For going to 18 sessions at the AAA? Yes you’re an idiot.

Send your “Dear Qual and Quant” questions and comments to: help@qualquant.net.


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