Compare methods

	Folk Taxonomy Analysis	Spradley Domain Analysis
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1979
Originator	Ethnoscience / cognitive anthropology (systematized by Spradley)	James P. Spradley
Type	Procedure for reconstructing hierarchical folk classifications	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
Aliases	Taxonomic Analysis, Folk Classification Analysis, Folk Taxonomies, Ethnotaxonomy	Developmental Research Sequence, DRS Domain Analysis, Ethnographic Domain Analysis, Semantic Domain Analysis
Related	3	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.	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.