Compare methods

	Cultural Domain Analysis	Free Listing
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	1988
Originator	Stephen P. Borgatti (synthesis of cognitive anthropology methods)	Cognitive anthropology tradition (formalized by Weller & Romney; Borgatti)
Type	Integrated framework for eliciting and analyzing cultural domains	Elicitation procedure for the items and salience of a cultural domain
Seminal source	Borgatti, S. P. (1994). Cultural domain analysis. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4(4), 261–278.	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742
Aliases	CDA, Domain Analysis (cognitive anthropology), Cultural Domains Approach, Cognitive Domain Analysis	Free Lists, Free-List Task, Free Recall Listing, Freelisting
Related	4	4
Summary	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?'	Free listing is a foundational elicitation technique in cognitive anthropology in which informants are asked to name, in any order, all the items they can think of that belong to a cultural domain — for example 'all the kinds of fruit' or 'all the things that can give you a cold.' Aggregating these lists reveals both the content of the domain (which items belong) and the salience of each item (how culturally central it is), inferred from how frequently and how early it is mentioned.