ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to place quantification in anthropology in the larger context of the division of labor in the social sciences. It argues that as anthropologists and ethnographers pay much closer attention to how people construct the world around them in terms of shared meaning than other social scientific disciplines and that the mixed-methods research designs can be uniquely suited to better understanding the causal implications of those cultural constructions. Understanding cultural construction and its effects necessitates engaging in traditional ethnographic research, as well as hypothesis-testing research employing quantitative data. These research techniques transition seamlessly from purely qualitative to purely quantitative and help to clarify the continuum on which different kinds of data lie. The strength of anthropological research lies in the configuration of methods, not in the specific application of one or another method.
