The cover of randomness: validating implicit methods for the study of sensitive topics.

IF 2.2 Q1 ANTHROPOLOGY
Evolutionary Human Sciences Pub Date : 2025-02-12 eCollection Date: 2025-01-01 DOI:10.1017/ehs.2024.48
Charles Efferson, Sonja Vogt
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

We review the methods we developed to study female genital cutting in Sudan and sex-selective abortion in Armenia. These methods were untested at the time of our original research, and here we compare the distinct but overlapping approaches we used to validate our methods for each of the two countries. Additionally, we repeat a number of analyses, including those related to validation, with previously unpublished data from Sudan. All results replicate previous findings. Replicating previous results is encouraging, but we nonetheless argue that validation for Armenia is more convincing than for Sudan. Specifically, even if female genital cutting and the preferential abortion of females are equally sensitive as research topics, son bias is inherently easier to study than cutting because biological sex determination is a random process with no natural analogue in the case of cutting. This randomness provides a kind of cover for research participants who are son-biased but want to create the impression that they are not. This cover, in turn, allows the researcher to resolve any trade-off between methods that produce explicit granular data and methods that produce untraceable, highly aggregated data in favour of methods producing the explicit and granular.

随机性的掩护:验证敏感话题研究的隐式方法。
我们回顾了我们开发的方法来研究女性生殖器切割在苏丹和性别选择性堕胎在亚美尼亚。这些方法在我们最初的研究中未经测试,在这里,我们比较了我们用于验证两个国家的方法的不同但重叠的方法。此外,我们用先前未发表的苏丹数据重复了一些分析,包括与验证相关的分析。所有结果都重复了先前的发现。重复以前的结果是令人鼓舞的,但我们仍然认为亚美尼亚的验证比苏丹更有说服力。具体来说,即使女性生殖器切割和女性优先堕胎同样是敏感的研究课题,儿子偏见本质上比切割更容易研究,因为生物性别决定是一个随机过程,在切割的情况下没有自然的类似物。这种随机性为研究参与者提供了一种掩护,他们对儿子有偏见,但又想给人一种自己没有偏见的印象。反过来,这种覆盖允许研究人员解决产生明确的颗粒数据的方法和产生不可追踪的、高度汇总的数据的方法之间的任何权衡,这些方法有利于产生明确和颗粒的方法。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Evolutionary Human Sciences
Evolutionary Human Sciences Social Sciences-Cultural Studies
CiteScore
4.60
自引率
11.50%
发文量
49
审稿时长
10 weeks
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