Compare methods

	Spradley Domain Analysis	Cultural Domain Analysis	Folk Taxonomy Analysis
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1994	1979
Originator	James P. Spradley	Stephen P. Borgatti (synthesis of cognitive anthropology methods)	Ethnoscience / cognitive anthropology (systematized by Spradley)
Type	Interpretive procedure for discovering folk semantic domains	Integrated framework for eliciting and analyzing cultural domains	Procedure for reconstructing hierarchical folk classifications
Seminal source	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	Developmental Research Sequence, DRS Domain Analysis, Ethnographic Domain Analysis, Semantic Domain Analysis	CDA, Domain Analysis (cognitive anthropology), Cultural Domains Approach, Cognitive Domain Analysis	Taxonomic Analysis, Folk Classification Analysis, Folk Taxonomies, Ethnotaxonomy
Related	3	4	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.	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?'	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.