ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that large-sample quantitative surveys are particularly important for comprehensive studies in larger populations, especially in cases where a number of separate communities are to be systematically compared. In order to do a systematic survey of basic demographic data, Elizabeth Colson selected a specific geographic area within the larger domain of Plateau Tonga people. J. C. Mitchell, in a paper entitled "On Quantification in Social Anthropology", noted that there were some impressive examples of quantitative data in ethnographic research in the decades before World War II. In the histories of cultural anthropology and related areas of ethnographic research there has been very considerable concentration on "high concordance" research areas—such as the study of languages, kinship systems, marital patterns in traditional societies, and folk tales, and the study of ritual behaviours in religion and other cultural sectors. Penn Handwerker and Danielle Wozniak have presented a study in which they demonstrated statistically the differences between "cultural data" and "individual experience data".
