Quantitative Anthropology: A Workbook

Quantitative Anthropology

A Workbook

Leslie Lea Williams, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Beloit College, Beloit, WI, United States

Kylie Quave, PhD

Assistant Professor, University Writing Program and Department of Anthropology, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., United States

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Authors Biographies

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Essentials for Quantifying Anthropological Data Sets

1.1. Addressing Anthropological Questions Using Quantitative Methods

1.2. Getting to Know SPSS; Entering Data and Types of Measurement

1.3. Getting to Know Excel and Importing Data

1.4. Importing Data into SPSS; Types of Variables

1.5. Creating Tables

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 2. Managing Anthropological Data Sets

2.1. Anthropological Challenges in Data Management

2.2. Data Management Practices

2.3. Recoding Variables in SPSS

2.4. Filtering Variables in SPSS

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 3. Visualizing Data

3.1. Uses of Visual Data Across the Anthropological Subfields

3.2. Graphing Nominal and Ordinal Data

3.3. Graphing Scale Data

3.4. Strategies for Optimal Presentation of Visual Data

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 4. Measures of Central Tendency and Dispersion

4.1. Using Central Tendency and Dispersion to Assess Anthropological Questions

4.2. Descriptive Statistics: Central Tendency and Dispersion

4.3. Bivariate Relationships

4.4. Descriptive Statistics: Dispersion

4.5. Coefficients of Variation

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 5. Exploring and Transforming Distributions

5.1. Using Distributions to Assess Anthropological Questions

5.2. Exploring the Shape of a Distribution

5.3. Transforming the Shape of a Distribution

5.4. z-Scores

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 6. Hypothesis Testing

6.1. Anthropological Hypothesis Testing Across the Subfields

6.2. Standard Error

6.3. Hypothesis Testing With the t-Distribution: Proportions

6.4. Hypothesis Testing with the t-Distribution: Means

6.5. Anthropological Challenges: Statistical Power

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 7. Comparing Two Groups: t-Tests

7.1. Anthropological Comparisons of Two Groups

7.2. Comparing Two Groups with Parametric Techniques

7.3. Paired-Samples t-Test

7.4. Nonparametric Alternatives to t-Tests

7.5. Calculating Effect Size

7.6. Anthropological Challenges: Reporting Results

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 8. Linear Associations: Correlation Analysis

8.1. Linear Associations in Anthropology

8.2. Descriptive Statistics and Data Visualization for Linear Associations; Assumptions of Linear Associations

8.3. Parametric Correlation Coefficient

8.4. Nonparametric Correlation Coefficients

8.5. Reporting Results of Tests of Linear Association

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 9. Regression Analysis

9.1. Uses of Anthropological Regression Analysis

9.2. Linear Regression Analysis

9.3. Anthropological Challenges: Reporting Results

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 10. Tests of Proportions: Chi-Square, Likelihood Ratio, Fisher's Exact Test

10.1. Anthropological Questions Using Proportional or Count Data

10.2. Descriptive Statistics and Data Visualization for Frequency Data

10.3. Univariate Chi-Square Test

10.4. Bivariate Chi-Square Test and Likelihood Ratio

10.5. Fisher's Exact Test

10.6. Post Hoc Tests of Comparison and Strength

10.7. Anthropological Challenges: Reporting Results

Supplementary Online Resources

Chapter 11. Comparing Three or More Groups: Analysis of Variance

11.1. Anthropological Questions Comparing More Than Two Groups

11.2. Comparing Three or More Groups With Parametric Techniques

11.3. Nonparametric Alternatives to ANOVA

11.4. Post Hoc Tests of Comparison and Strength; Effect Size: Eta Squared

11.5. Anthropological Challenges: Reporting Results

Supplementary Online Resources

Appendix 1. Distribution Tables

Appendix 2. Further Reading

Index

Copyright

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Notices

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Authors Biographies

Leslie Lea Williams, PhD

Dr. Williams is a bioarchaeologist whose primary research centers on understanding human response and adaptation to mass disaster and climate change using an evolutionary framework that incorporates local context, cultural environments, and human health. She has taught courses on quantitative methods in anthropology and has presented research on database design and management. Her research spans osteology, archaeology, paleopathology, and historical demography in Germany, England, Italy, and the United States. She has a PhD from the Ohio State University in Anthropology and an MSc from the University of Sheffield in Human Osteology and Funerary Archaeology.

Kylie Quave, PhD

Dr. Quave is an anthropological archaeologist who has conducted archaeological and ethnohistorical research in the South American Andes for more than a decade. Her work focuses on the everyday experiences among households in communities facing Inca imperialism and Spanish colonialism (11th to 18th centuries). She conducts fieldwork in the rural heartland of the Inca empire in Cusco, Peru. She teaches quantitative anthropology and writing about quantitative social science, as well as researching liberal arts pedagogies. Her work has been published in domestic and international venues, recently including Journal of Field Archaeology, Latin American Antiquity, and Museum Management and Curatorship.

Acknowledgments

The exercises in this workbook were developed with feedback from five semesters of Beloit College students enrolled in our quantitative anthropology course. These students' engagement with the materials helped us significantly in subsequent iterations. We thank them for their patience, enthusiasm, and insights.

The first author is grateful to Patrick Mahoney (The University of Kent), Glynis Jones (University of Sheffield), Paul Sciulli (emeritus, The Ohio State University), Steve Naber (The Ohio State University), and Rosemary Joyce (University of California, Berkeley) for their guidance and instruction in quantitative theory and technique. The second author owes immense thanks to B. Sunday Eiselt for introducing her to the use of quantitative methods for archeology in an expertly designed graduate course at Southern Methodist University.

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the proposal for this workbook, who pushed us to incorporate much-needed sections and to think critically about the kinds of anthropological problems posed to students in these exercises.

Introduction

Purpose of This Workbook

When teaching our courses on quantitative analysis and methods in anthropology, we noticed a lack of publications in which students are encouraged to engage directly with anthropological data from various subfields. Anthropology is unique among the social sciences (and the humanities and biological sciences), in that its methods span qualitative and quantitative methods, its data span behavior and biology, and its work is both historical/observational and experimental. This workbook is meant to supplement a textbook or instructor's lectures to guide students through quantitative analysis of real and relevant anthropological datasets. We encourage the student to make their own choices as they navigate research questions related to three anthropological subdisciplines: cultural anthropology, archeology, and biological anthropology. This workbook is designed to foster understanding of quantitative techniques through hands-on interaction with research questions.

This manual:

• Integrates quantitative techniques with theoretical fluency, encouraging students to make connections between big picture questions in anthropology, and the methods used to address those questions. Although many datasets are contextually specific, they touch on questions of human variation, the interrelationships of biology and culture, and the quantitative methods that allow anthropologists to better understand humanity.

• Focuses on practical use of Excel and SPSS (as the most widely used and accessible software in the discipline) to apply quantitative methods to anthropological contexts

• Includes exercises in both parametric and nonparametric inferential statistics as well as descriptive statistics, building first on competency in data management, collection, and graphical display

• Emphasizes students' understanding of the usefulness, limitations, and application of statistical techniques, rather than merely memorizing equations

• Enhances critical thinking through ongoing engagement with literature in quantitative anthropology as a complement to the experiential techniques stressed through the workbook style

• Provides increasingly complex exercises that build on cumulative learning from chapter to chapter and that stress application of methods beyond coursework

These exercises were created in Microsoft Excel 2013 for Windows, and IBM SPSS Version 24. IBM has multiple online resources for using SPSS, including video user guides and tutorials. https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLVMB_23.0.0.

User Guide for the Instructor

This book is meant to accompany your in-class lectures and any quantitative methods textbooks that you assign to your students. As such, most of the exercises were developed under the assumption that students are already familiar with the definitions of certain terms and will understand the basic background to the concepts discussed in the book. We provide statistical datasets for you to use, as well as step-by-step instructions for conducting analysis in SPSS, Excel, or by hand.

We also provide extensive online instructor resources, including lesson plans to complement exercises and separate online resources for students and instructors. These are available at Elsevier's companion website (Instructor website: http://textbooks.elsevier.com/web/Manuals.aspx?isbn=9780128127759).

These resources, along with the exercises in the text itself, allow for adaptation of the materials for specific courses and purposes. Exercises are modular insofar as they can be extracted and repackaged according to unique course needs; some exercises stand alone, and many of the later chapters can be used alone. The exercises can be used for experiential learning both as in-class exercises or assignments outside the class meeting time. We do recommend spending some time in class reviewing the answers or output with students, and making sure there are sufficient workstations with SPSS and Excel installed on your campus to allow students to work with the exercises outside of class time.

User Guide for the Student

In this text, we provide instructions for working with quantitative data from a variety of sources to answer anthropological questions. For this manual to work well, you should use the datasets provided on the website and follow the instructions for each exercise. Throughout the text, you will notice some formatting that will help you replicate the instructions on your own computer.

Variable names are in sans serif font and italics.

Drop down menus from the top of the main Excel/SPSS window are in bolded

small caps .

Buttons within windows are formatted in bold.

Selection boxes are in italics.

Areas to enter variables or formulae are underlined.

Questions throughout the text ask you to think critically about the data you are examining and to use an anthropological and theoretically engaged lens to interpret your results. This means that some questions (as in much of anthropological research) may not have a single correct answer. What we want you to do is to make choices about how to use your samples, record and justify your choices, and interpret your results. These are real data sets, and reality is messy—working within that messiness is the anthropologist's job. We hope that these exercises prepare you to address your own quantitative research questions.

Supplementary Resources Overview (Online Materials)

Online supplementary resources fall into two categories:

1. Student resources: data files for exercises, links to online data analysis resources, and additional reading suggestions available at https://www.elsevier.com/books-and-journals/book-companion/9780128127759.

2. Instructor resources: answer keys for questions and SPSS exercise outputs, materials related to suggested class assignments available at http://textbooks.elsevier.com/web/Manuals.aspx?isbn=9780128127759.

Suggested Course Schedule and Topics

Semester (15   week) term, with a final project assignment included.

WEEK 1: Course Overview, Data Definitions, and Introduction to Course Concepts

Assignment: Chapter 1

WEEK 2: Quantitative Analysis in the Anthropological Subfields and Data Visualization

Assignment: Chapters 2 and 3

WEEK 3: Central Tendency and Dispersion

Assignment: Chapter 4

WEEK 4: Distribution

Assignment: Chapter 5

WEEK 5: Exam I, Project Brainstorming

WEEK 6: Hypothesis Testing

Assignment: Chapter 6

WEEK 7: Sampling Strategies and Peer Review

Assignment: Final Project Topic and Hypotheses

WEEK 8: Comparing Two Groups/Samples

Assignment: Chapter 7

WEEK 9: Measures of Association

Assignment: Chapter 8

WEEK 10: Regression Analysis

Assignment: Chapter 9

WEEK 11: Exam II

Assignment: Data Dictionary and Planned Tables and Figures

WEEK 12: Chi-square and Tests of Proportions

Assignment: Chapter 10

WEEK 13: Analysis of Variance

Assignment: Chapter 11

WEEK 14: Presenting Quantitative Results and Ethical Considerations

Assignment: Final Project Statistical Tests

WEEK 15: Student Poster Presentations

Chapter 1

Essentials for Quantifying Anthropological