Compare methods

	Spradley Domain Analysis	Componential Analysis (Ethnographic)
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1979
Originator	James P. Spradley	Ethnoscience tradition (Goodenough, Lounsbury; systematized by Spradley)
Type	Interpretive procedure for discovering folk semantic domains	Feature-based analysis of contrasts within a folk domain
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	Developmental Research Sequence, DRS Domain Analysis, Ethnographic Domain Analysis, Semantic Domain Analysis	Ethnographic Componential Analysis, Feature Analysis of Kin and Folk Terms, Componential Analysis of Meaning, Contrast-Set Feature Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	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.