Cultural anthropologists use a large repertoire of theoretical and methodological approaches in the course of their ethnographic studies. This eclecticism often obscures the common elements underlying good research. This project supports a summer institute in research design in cultural anthropology. Experts in research design and in the link between data and theory will teach a set of 15 graduate students, chosen competitively from Ph.D. programs throughout the US, during a period of 3 weeks. Course content will cover a broad spectrum of issues focusing on the link between theory and the development of research objectives, concepts, definitions, variables, measures and hypotheses; the relationship between quantitative and qualitative approaches in the ethnographic context; systematic data collection procedures; probability and non-probability sampling; statistical distributions and elementary data analysis. . The emphasis will be on concepts (e.g., sampling theory), research design, data management in both a qualitative and quantitative context, and strategies of hypothesis testing.
The broader impacts relate to the training of graduate students, who may not be receiving an adequate exposure to these issues in their department, on research concepts and techniques in scientific anthropology. The results of this workshop should be to increase the competence of students to do significant dissertation research projects and to become more proficient social scientists in general.
