Research Methods in Anthropology

H. Russell Bernard's Research Methods in Anthropology, Sixth Edition, is the standard for learning about the range of methods for collecting and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data about human thought and human behavior.

In the first section of the book, students learn the elements of research design, including how to choose a research topic, how to develop research questions and hypotheses, and how to choose an appropriate sample for their research.

In the next section, students learn the methods of data collection, including: open-ended interviewing, questionnaire design, participant observation, direct and indirect observation, building scales in the field, and taking and managing field notes. This section also introduces the methods for cultural domain analysis and network analysis.

The last section of the book covers methods for analyzing all these kinds of data, including: finding and analyzing themes in text, conversation and narrative analysis, and decision modeling, as well as descriptive and inferential statistics, multidimensional scaling. and cluster analysis. There is no separate chapter on ethics. That topic is important in every phase of research, even in the beginning phase of choosing a problem to study, and is covered throughout the book.