Compare methods

	Spradley Domain Analysis	Folk Taxonomy Analysis
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1979
Originator	James P. Spradley	Ethnoscience / cognitive anthropology (systematized by Spradley)
Type	Interpretive procedure for discovering folk semantic domains	Procedure for reconstructing hierarchical folk classifications
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	Taxonomic Analysis, Folk Classification Analysis, Folk Taxonomies, Ethnotaxonomy
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.	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.