Research Design and Methods in Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology is the study of health and healing in cross‐cultural and evolutionary perspective. This chapter reviews the basic elements of research design and provides a framework for matching methods to questions across different research traditions. The breadth of medical anthropology makes it impractical to discuss the full range of relevant methods of data collection and analysis. Research design is about posing good questions and finding empirical answers. A better starting point for thinking about research design is to recognize a continuum of research objectives, ranging from exploratory to confirmatory research questions. Methods of data collection in medical anthropology fall into three broad categories: participant observation, systematic observation, and interview methods. Medical anthropology, like the social sciences generally, is often described in terms of a dichotomy between “qualitative” and “quantitative” methods of social research.