The Institute for Social Science Research in Partnership with the American Anthropological Association
Online Course: Cultural Domain Analysis: Methods for Human Insight Research
AAA member registration fee $75.00 ($200 to general public)
Cultural domain analysis (CDA) consists of a set of methods for collecting and analyzing data about how people in a group think about things that somehow go together. The goal is to understand differences in how people in different cultures (or subcultures) view things in the world. CDA comes from anthropology and is used in research in that field, but has wide application in marketing, public health, education, environmental sciences, and other fields.
Course Instructor: Dr. Rosalyn Negrón, University of Massachusetts Boston
About the course
In this course, you'll learn:
- How to define a cultural domain
- Hands-on methods, like free lists and pile sorts, for collecting data about how groups of people think about a set of things in a cultural domain
- Methods for analyzing those data -- methods like multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis and cultural consensus analysis
- Methods for visualizing the results of your analysis in graphs
- All of these methods are taught through lectures, demonstrations and practical exercises with software*.
A Windows Operating System environment is required in order to successfully complete the activities in this course.
How can I use cultural domain analysis in my career?
Cultural domain analysis (and the methods of cognitive anthropology in general) are immediately useful in many careers, including all of the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology, social psychology, political science and economics) as well as in marketing and user experience studies, public health, environmental research, urban planning, criminology, communications -- in fact, in any field where the goal is to learn how individuals and teams of people categorize the world and how these views on the world impact their work.