Measuring Culture as Shared Knowledge: Do Data Collection Formats Matter? Cultural Knowledge of Plant Uses Among Tsimane’ Amerindians, Bolivia

Abstract

In this article, the authors contribute to the empirical study of culture as shared knowledge by exploring correlations of individual responses to different questionnaires of the same tasks and correlation of individual responses to different tasks. They collected data on ethnobotanical knowledge from 149 adult Tsimane’ Amerindians in Bolivia. The authors used a cultural consensus model to calculate individual scores of cultural knowledge for each questionnaire, correlating individual scores using pooled samples and various subsamples. Results from multiplechoice questionnaires show high reliability. A comparison of competency scores from the paired-comparison and the average of the three multiple-choice questionnaires showed a positive correlation ( r = .46), although it was lower than when comparing multiple-choice to each other. Competency on the triad questionnaire did not correlate with information from any of the other questionnaires. The evidence presented suggests that cultural competence may be consistent across questionnaires of the same task but not necessarily across different tasks in the same domain.