Ethnographic Free-List Data (Paperback)

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.

Benjamin Grant Purzycki is Associate Professor at Aarhus University. He is a cognitive and evolutionary cultural anthropologist and focuses on the causal role of various demographic and cultural factors on human cooperation. He has conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic (Russia) and managed large, cross-cultural projects. His most recent books include The Minds of Gods: New Horizons in the Naturalistic Study of Religion (Bloomsbury), Ethnographic Free-List Data (Sage), and Morality and the Gods (Cambridge University Press).
Personal website: www.bgpurzycki.wordpress.com