Considerations for Collecting Freelists in the Field: Examples from Ethobotany

In freelists, informants create an inventory of all the items they know within a given category. Freelists reveal cultural salience and variation in individuals’ topical knowledge. The ease and accuracy of freelist interviewing makes it ideal for collecting data on local knowledge from relatively large samples. This method, however, does not work well with broad topical areas: People tend to omit some items and cluster responses as they unpack mental subcategories. Successive freelisting can reduce and redefine topics (domains), thus focusing the content of interviews. In oral freelists, interviewers should prevent bystanders from contaminating the informant’s list, and written freelists are advisable in literate communities. Responses from freelists should be cross-checked with informal methods as much as practicable, as in this Caribbean case. With proper attention to detail, freelisting can amass high-quality ethnobotanical data.