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Cultural Domain Analysis×Spradley Domain Analysis×
FieldAnthropologyAnthropology
FamilyProcess / pipelineProcess / pipeline
Year of origin19941979
OriginatorStephen P. Borgatti (synthesis of cognitive anthropology methods)James P. Spradley
TypeIntegrated framework for eliciting and analyzing cultural domainsInterpretive procedure for discovering folk semantic domains
Seminal sourceBorgatti, S. P. (1994). Cultural domain analysis. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4(4), 261–278. link ↗Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN: 9780030444968
AliasesCDA, Domain Analysis (cognitive anthropology), Cultural Domains Approach, Cognitive Domain AnalysisDevelopmental Research Sequence, DRS Domain Analysis, Ethnographic Domain Analysis, Semantic Domain Analysis
Related43
SummaryCultural 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?'Spradley's domain analysis is the first analytic step in James Spradley's Developmental Research Sequence for ethnography. It systematically searches interview and observation data for cultural domains — categories of meaning organized around a cover term and the more specific terms it includes — by looking for the semantic relationships, such as 'is a kind of' or 'is a way to,' that informants use to connect them. The goal is to discover how members of a culture organize their knowledge in their own words.
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ScholarGateCompare methods: Cultural Domain Analysis · Spradley Domain Analysis. Retrieved 2026-06-25 from https://scholargate.app/en/compare