ABSTRACT
Free listing is the easiest, quickest, and most productive interview technique for getting a good 'start list' of the contents of a specific cultural domain, or topic, that one interested in. Of course, 'cultural domain that one interested in' covers a wide range, and there are an endless number of possible free lists. The results of free listing are so robust that it is usually unnecessary to worry about getting a random sample. Ethnographers have used the technique of free listing for a long time, but this research tool became more prominent and better understood as a result of Weller and Romney's Systematic Data Collection. In many research situations the most important objective is to get a rough draft of the inventory without worrying whether the list is complete. They noted that one important use of free listing is to identify the inventory of items and, by inference, the boundaries of a particular cultural domain.
