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| Smith's Salience Index (S)× | Free Listing× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Anthropology | Anthropology |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 1993 | 1988 |
| Originator≠ | J. Jerome Smith; popularized through ANTHROPAC (Borgatti) and AnthroTools | Cognitive anthropology tradition (formalized by Weller & Romney; Borgatti) |
| Type≠ | Salience statistic combining mention frequency and recall order in free-list data | Elicitation procedure for the items and salience of a cultural domain |
| Seminal source≠ | Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421 | Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742 |
| Aliases | Smith's S, Salience Index S, Free-List Salience, Item Salience Score | Free Lists, Free-List Task, Free Recall Listing, Freelisting |
| Related | 4 | 4 |
| Summary≠ | Smith's salience index, conventionally written S, is the standard statistic for summarizing free-list data: for each item it combines how many informants mentioned the item with how early the item appeared in their lists. Within a single list each item receives a local salience equal to the number of items below it divided by the list length, so the first item scores highest and the last scores lowest; S is then the average of that local salience across the entire sample, counting zero for informants who never listed the item. The result is a single per-item number that ranks the items of a cultural domain by their joint frequency-and-priority prominence. | 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. |
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