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amanthro-research-design

Research
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Use when defending the research design of an American Anthropologist (AA) manuscript — fieldwork and participant observation, interview and archival design for ethnographic/qualitative work, material/contextual analysis for archaeology, and appropriate lab/quantitative design for biological anthropology. AA judges each mode on its own terms with reflexivity. Strengthens the design; it does not write code or run fieldwork.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/American-Anthropologist-Skills/skills/amanthro-research-design/SKILL.md

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Research Design (amanthro-research-design)

AA accepts many methodologies but is demanding about each. The design must credibly connect the argument (amanthro-theory-building) to evidence — and at AA, ethnographic and qualitative inference is first-class, not a soft substitute for statistics. This skill is mode-aware: pick the section that matches your work and defend it against the strongest alternative reading, reflexively and ethically.

When to trigger

  • Specifying fieldwork, sampling of sites/interlocutors, archive or material selection, or lab design
  • A reviewer questioned your evidence, generalization, confound, or interpretive leap
  • Planning consent, anonymization, and community accountability into the design
  • Justifying why your evidence adjudicates the rival reading from amanthro-literature-positioning

Ethnographic / qualitative (first-class at AA)

  • Fieldwork design. State the site(s), duration, language(s) of work, and your access — and how each shaped what was observable. Participant observation is a method with a logic, not just "being there"; say what kinds of evidence it generates.
  • Sampling of cases/interlocutors justified by design logic (typical, deviant, contrastive, theoretically driven), not convenience. Say what the case is a case of.
  • Triangulation & disconfirmation. Corroborate across observation, interviews, documents, and material; state what evidence would have disconfirmed the reading (the qualitative analogue of a falsification test).
  • Reflexivity. Your positionality is part of the design's validity — name how it bears on access and interpretation (see amanthro-theory-building).

Archival / material analysis

  • Justify the archive or assemblage selected, its silences and biases, and how you read against the grain. For archaeology: provenience, sampling, dating logic, comparative frames, and taphonomic caveats.

Biological / physical anthropology (quantitative/lab)

  • State the estimand or comparison, sampling frame, measurement protocol, and replication.
  • Report power/sample adequacy; pre-register where appropriate; address batch/lab effects, ancestry vs. social-race conflation, and ethical sourcing of skeletal/genetic/biological samples (see amanthro-transparency-and-data for repatriation and consent).

Multimodal / participatory design

  • If image/sound/film is evidence, design capture and consent for media from the start; participatory and collaborative designs name how community partners shaped questions and authority over outputs.

The adjudication test (AA-specific)

For the single strongest rival reading, write one sentence: "If the rival account were right rather than mine, the evidence would look like ___; instead it looks like ___." If you cannot, the design does not yet identify the contribution — regardless of how rich the material is.

Anti-patterns

  • "Being there" treated as self-justifying — participant observation without a stated evidentiary logic
  • Convenience site/interlocutor selection dressed up as theory-driven
  • Causal or generalizing language an ethnographic design cannot support (and vice versa: dismissing qualitative evidence as merely anecdotal)
  • Biological "race" treated as a natural kind; ancestry conflated with social race
  • Consent, anonymization, or heritage obligations left out of the design (see amanthro-transparency-and-data)
  • A design that cannot distinguish your reading from the leading alternative

Output format

【Mode】ethnographic / archival-material / biological-quant / multimodal-participatory
【Evidence base】sites/interlocutors/assemblage/sample + how selected
【Key assumption(s)】and how each is defended (incl. reflexivity)
【Rival ruled out】the adjudication sentence
【Disconfirmation】what would have shown you wrong
【Ethics designed in】consent / anonymization / accountability flagged? [Y/N]
【Next】amanthro-data-analysis

Supplementary resources