Narrative and Database Analysis

Abstract

Narrative and database analysis has become an increasingly common tool among anthropologists. Its strengths include affording researchers the ability to quantify and make statistically supported interpretations of their data. This approach also allows researchers to record massive amounts of information about a single culture over a long period of time or even multiple groups longitudinally. This strength is also its weakness as often such quantification methods require that semantic information, which might hold rich meaning, is sacrificed. Furthermore, discrepancies between data‐coding schemes or the perceptions of human coders can result in incompatible datasets that are problematic or not valid if combined to create larger analyses. Nonetheless, when performed rigorously, narrative and database analysis provides a very powerful tool for anthropologists that straddles the boundary between qualitative and quantitative approaches.