Compare methods

	Spradley Domain Analysis	Componential Analysis (Ethnographic)	Cultural Domain Analysis
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1979	1994
Originator	James P. Spradley	Ethnoscience tradition (Goodenough, Lounsbury; systematized by Spradley)	Stephen P. Borgatti (synthesis of cognitive anthropology methods)
Type	Interpretive procedure for discovering folk semantic domains	Feature-based analysis of contrasts within a folk domain	Integrated framework for eliciting and analyzing cultural 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.
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	CDA, Domain Analysis (cognitive anthropology), Cultural Domains Approach, Cognitive Domain Analysis
Related	3	3	4
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.	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?'