Cultural Domain Analysis
Cultural domain analysis is the integrated framework in cognitive anthropology for discovering the content and structure of a cultural domain — a coherent set of related items such as illnesses, animals, kin terms, or emotions — as the members of a culture themselves organize it. It chains together elicitation methods (free listing, pile sorting, triad tests) and analytic methods (salience, multidimensional scaling, clustering, consensus analysis) to move from 'what items are in this domain?' to 'how are they organized and how widely is that organization shared?'
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Method map
The neighbourhood of related methods — select a node to explore.
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Sources
- Borgatti, S. P. (1994). Cultural domain analysis. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4(4), 261–278. link ↗
- Borgatti, S. P., & Halgin, D. S. (2011). Mapping culture: Freelists, pilesorting, triads and consensus analysis. In J. Schensul & M. LeCompte (Eds.), The Ethnographer's Toolkit, Vol. 3. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. link ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Cultural Domain Analysis (CDA). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/anthropology/cultural-domain-analysis
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Cultural Consensus ModelAnthropology↔ compare
- Free ListingAnthropology↔ compare
- Pile SortingAnthropology↔ compare
- Triad TestAnthropology↔ compare