Compare methods

	Folk Taxonomy Analysis	Componential Analysis (Ethnographic)	Cultural Domain Analysis	Spradley Domain Analysis
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1979	1994	1979
Originator	Ethnoscience / cognitive anthropology (systematized by Spradley)	Ethnoscience tradition (Goodenough, Lounsbury; systematized by Spradley)	Stephen P. Borgatti (synthesis of cognitive anthropology methods)	James P. Spradley
Type	Procedure for reconstructing hierarchical folk classifications	Feature-based analysis of contrasts within a folk domain	Integrated framework for eliciting and analyzing cultural domains	Interpretive procedure for discovering folk semantic domains
Seminal source	Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN: 9780030444968	Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN: 9780030444968	Borgatti, S. P. (1994). Cultural domain analysis. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4(4), 261–278.	Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN: 9780030444968
Aliases	Taxonomic Analysis, Folk Classification Analysis, Folk Taxonomies, Ethnotaxonomy	Ethnographic Componential Analysis, Feature Analysis of Kin and Folk Terms, Componential Analysis of Meaning, Contrast-Set Feature Analysis	CDA, Domain Analysis (cognitive anthropology), Cultural Domains Approach, Cognitive Domain Analysis	Developmental Research Sequence, DRS Domain Analysis, Ethnographic Domain Analysis, Semantic Domain Analysis
Related	3	3	4	3
Summary	Folk taxonomy analysis — taxonomic analysis in Spradley's terms — reconstructs how a culture hierarchically classifies the items of a domain through the inclusion relationship 'is a kind of.' It takes the terms surfaced in domain analysis and arranges them into nested levels, revealing the folk classification system: which broad categories contain which narrower ones, and how deep the hierarchy goes. The result is the culture's own taxonomy, which may differ markedly from any scientific one.	Ethnographic componential analysis is the analytic step that specifies the meaning of folk terms by laying out the distinctive attributes — the components — that distinguish each term from the others in the same contrast set. Rooted in the ethnoscience study of kinship terminologies and systematized within Spradley's Developmental Research Sequence, it builds a paradigm: a grid of terms against the dimensions of contrast that defines exactly what makes, say, an 'uncle' different from a 'cousin' in a given culture's own logic.	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?'	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.