Hunter-Gatherers in eHRAF

Try Browse Subjects (opens in new tab) and enter a variety of seed words to find relevant subjects (or use the Subject box in Advanced Search) for your main area of interest. Read subject definitions and look for related subjects or broader or narrower categories. Alternatively, try keywords in Advanced Search (opens in new tab) and read some paragraphs in the results to see what subjects were used to index the paragraph. Filter to hunter-gatherers after a search. Do not expect to find information for all cases, but it is good to have information on at least 30 cases. See the tip below on finding information on other variables of interest.

HRAF tries to put together culture collections that encompass multiple time frames and places. You should try to focus on a time frame most relevant to your research. For example, if you want to study traditional religious practices or traditional hunter-gatherer practices, you should aim for the earlier materials. There are two main ways to find information on time frames: a) when you look at culture results we display some information about the documents — in contrast to the publication date, time coverage conveys the time frame the information pertains to; b) use HRAF’s Cross-Cultural Concordance (opens in new tab), which not only matches time and place foci across samples, but also identifies documents in eHRAF World Cultures that are part of the same focus. To learn more about the HRAF Concordance, look for the appropriate video in the Coding section (opens in new tab) of the Advanced Cross-Cultural Course.

There are two different filters under the subsistence heading for the two types of hunter-gatherer cases. You can use one or both of the filters, depending upon your research interests. We recommend looking at the two types separately before you decide to combine them. To show whether hunter-gatherers differ from other types of societies, you might also want to contrast hunter-gatherer societies with other types of societies.

As a start, explore Explaining Human Culture (opens in new tab), which focuses on cross-cultural research on non-industrial societies.

No. eHRAF World Cultures grew somewhat opportunistically, so we recommend using a sub-sample such as the 186 Standard Cross-Cultural Sample cases; the 60 Probability Sample Files cases; the Simple Random Sample cases (about 28); or a combination. You can Filter to these samples after a search. See the Advanced Course section on Sampling (opens in new tab) to explore these different samples and how they might work for you. Note that it is usually not necessary to use all the cases in a sample; choosing a random sample of a larger sample is often acceptable.

D-PLACE.org (opens in new tab) has compiled a lot of coded variables from different cross-cultural samples. To minimize measurement error, you should match the time and place foci for the variables you plan to code. eHRAF World Cultures provides document matches to two main samples with coded variables. To find these document matches use the Filter “Document Level Sample.” The sample with the largest number of coded variables (over 2,000) is the 186 case Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Most of the 60 Probability Samples Files (PSF) are included in the Ethnographic Atlas (EA) which has a substantial number of coded variables.

To learn more, look at the video in the Coding section (opens in new tab) of the Advanced Cross-Cultural Course on D-PLACE.org (opens in new tab).

Remember that eHRAF World Cultures searches by paragraph. Rarely will all the variables of interest to you appear in the same paragraph. Your main topic of interest should always be looked for first because whether or not there is enough information will limit your search strategy. We recommend measuring each variable or closely related sets of variables in separate searches.

The measurement process is almost always iterative because you need to take care to develop measures that match the kind of information found in ethnographies. If possible, you want to try to employ higher forms of measurement (ordinal or interval measures), but more precision is not desirable if the data for such precision are not available. Also, you need to assess if coders understand and can code reliably using the coding instructions you develop. See the Advanced Course videos on Measurement (opens in new tab), Minimizing Errors in Measurement (opens in new tab), and Coding (opens in new tab).

A playlist of tutorial videos (opens in new tab) can be found on the HRAF YouTube channel.