4 - Cultural Issues in Measurement and Bias

Summary

Q. What's the difference between an anthropologist and an epidemiologist?

A. The anthropologist thinks that the plural of anecdote is “data.”

(Anonymous)

Introduction

Anthropology and epidemiology are dedicated directly or indirectly to the study of human cultural practices and how those practices affect human health and disease. They must be fundamentally concerned with the theories that help guide and explain their discoveries as well as with the methods used to make those discoveries. Chapter 2 explained that these disciplines began with a fundamental concern for fieldwork, with the researchers always refining and adjusting how and why they collect information. Chapter 3 reviewed a few of the variables used to describe disease patterns, showing that new questions and concerns are raised when social scientists, particularly anthropologists, unpack the assumptions underlying such variables. This chapter pays more specific attention to the collection of data. I argue that data collection is built on a series of cultural conventions, not all of which facilitate valid measurement. Data collection is improved when those conventions are acknowledged and confronted.

The chapter-opening quote and Figure 4.1 show some of the cultural conventions around data collection. The quote portrays a standard critique of anthropology, namely that it studies too few people and mistakes mere anecdote for data. Figure 4.1 shows a standard kind of cartoon genre, the “public opinion poll.” This one pokes fun at the pollsters and all the invisible interpretive errors that can take place between a household interview and a final monolithic summary statistic.