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Anthropology 309: Quantitative
Methods in Anthropology
Skills needed
Why do
for quantitative quantitative
research?
research?
• Get in groups of three
or four and take a few
minutes to think of
some responses to this
question.
• There is no punishment
in archaeology for poor
quantitative work.
Humans are
natural
statisticians
Contra Cowgill 2015
Gopnik, A. (2012). "Scientific
Thinking in Young Children: …"
Science 337(6102): 1623-1627.
Statistical Words of Wisdom
• Significance testing
• Figures and Tables
• Sample sizes
• The right stat for the
job
• Reliability and Validity
At what point(s) in your research
should you think about
quantitative issues?
What are data and variables?
• Data are observations, not things. We generate
data; we do not find or discover data.
• “We create data to serve a purpose defined by a
pre-existing intellectual framework.”
• “A variable is any quality of the real world that can
be characterized as having alternative states”
• We also create variables to make our data
generation systematic.
data
variables