With the support of the National Science Foundation (BCS #2020156), HRAF held three years of Summer Institutes for Cross-Cultural Anthropological Research from 2021-2023. In total, these Summer Institutes trained 44 faculty, researchers, and advanced graduate students in theory and state-of-the art methods for conducting regional and worldwide comparative research. The primary instructors were Carol R. Ember (Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, USA), Fiona Jordan (University of Bristol, UK) and Séan Roberts (Cardiff University, UK). Additional lectures were delivered by Damián Blasi, Alexandra Brewis Slade, Joshua Conrad Jackson, Jeremy Koster, Erik Ringen, Eleanor Power, and Amber Wutich.
HRAF is pleased to announce that at the end of October we are making course materials based on these Summer Institutes available to the public. These materials are a more advanced version of the current mini-course available as Introduction to Cross-Cultural Research.
Carol Ember, the President of HRAF, will introduce these course materials in a workshop offered on the following dates. Registration is required.
Click below to register for your preferred date and time:
Tuesday, October 28 at 1:00 pm Eastern Time
Thursday, November 13 at 11:00 am Eastern Time
Tuesday, December 2 at 11:00 am Eastern Time
Topics in the course include:
- The logic and types of comparisons (including collaborative projects), and the types of research questions asked by cross-cultural researchers
- How to derive testable hypotheses and design appropriate measures from specified theoretical principles
- Designing measures and coding protocols to test hypotheses, with a focus on the ethnographic record
- Approaches to minimize random and systematic error
- Sampling strategies and issues of independence
- Introduction to a range of statistical approaches (non-linear and non-normal data, unidimensional scaling, multidimensional scaling and dimension reduction, multilevel modeling and causal graphs, Bayesian approaches, phylogenetic inference and comparative phylogenetic methods, and social network analysis)
- Reviews of available data and databases (including a concordance of cross-cultural analysis)