Distance Learning
The Research Methods in Anthropology courses are taught by top instructors in the field of anthropology. They are designed for current anthropologists and those seeking to become anthropologists, who are looking to strengthen their skills in research methods. The emphasis in each course is on skills for collecting and analyzing the many kinds of data that anthropologists work with. For more information, including how to apply and registration dates, click the tabs below.
The University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Anthropology Department believes that social researchers should be fluent in the full range of methods for collecting and analyzing data. This online graduate certificate program aims to help researchers choose the right tools, emphasizing the integration and complementary applications of qualitative and quantitative data and analysis. Courses in this online program were developed with support from the National Science Foundation's Program in Cultural Anthropology.
Classes Start: May 14
Classes End: June 22
For details on dates for payment and registration in Summer A 2018, visit the UF Catalog site.
Classes Start: July 2
Classes End: August 10
For details on dates for payment and registration in Summer B 2018, visit the UF Catalog site.
During the Summer semester the University of Florida offers a series of online courses on research methods in cultural anthropology. The courses carry 3 hours of graduate credit and are open to upper division undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. The emphasis in each course is on skills for collecting and analyzing the many kinds of data that anthropologists work with.
Each course has 12-15 hours of lecture and 30-33 hours of online, interactive instruction. Courses are limited to 24 participants.
This intensive course introduces different components of geospatial analysis and their applications in Anthropology: Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing (RS), Global Positioning System (GPS), and their integration. The course covers basic concepts necessary to work with geospatial data. We pay particular attention to research set-up and design, and the use of specialized software such as ArcGIS via hands-on activities.
Course Objectives
This graduate seminar surveys methods of text analysis. The focus of the course is on developing skills that students can use to do systematic analysis of textual data, including written texts, photos, and audio or video data. The course will explore a range of inductive and deductive approaches and will cover analytic skills that cut across traditions, including theme identification, code definition, and construction of codebooks, and teamwork in text analysis. Advanced topics covered will include schema analysis, grounded theory, classical content analysis, content dictionaries, word-based analysis, and semantic network analysis.
Course Objectives
Students taking this course will:
This course covers the major methods for collecting and analyzing data about how people in a cultural group think about lists of things that somehow go together. These can be physical, observable things—kinds of wine, kinds of music, rock singers, foods that are appropriate for dessert, medicinal plants, ice cream flavors, animals you can keep at home, horror movies, symptoms of illness—or conceptual things like occupations, roles, emotions, things to do on vacation, things you can do to help the environment, and so on. While the method comes was developed in cognitive anthropology, it is now used in fields such as marketing, product development, and public health.
The data collection methods covered in the course include: free lists, pile sorts, and ratings. The data analysis methods include: multidimensional scaling, hierarchical clustering, property fitting (PROFIT), quadratic assignment procedure (QAP), consensus analysis, and cultural consonance analysis. Participants get hands-on practice with the data collection and data analysis techniques using software and learn how the methods can be used in many different areas of research, including the analysis of qualitative data (like text and images) and in social network analysis.
Course Objectives
Students taking this course will:
These courses are open to graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students, to professors and to practicing anthropologists and other social scientists. The courses each carry three graduate credits at the University of Florida, but may be taken without credit (see below, on the continuing education option). The cost of each course is the same to all participants.
To register for any of these courses, click here and then click "click to begin" on the bottom left of the opening screen. Next, choose "THE COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES - CLAS - RESEARCH METHODS IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY" from the "College" drop-down box. Be sure to enter the course information for the course(s) that you are requesting registration for. To register for the courses as a Non-Credit student, click here.
Registration Notes:
ANG 5488: Geospatial Analysis in Cultural Anthropology
ANG 5494: Text Analysis in Cultural Anthropology
ANG 6481: Research Methods in Cognitive Anthropology – Cultural Domain AnalysisTo register for the courses as a Non-Credit student, click here.
The cost for each course is $1,200.00, plus a $39.96 fee per course. Enrollment in these courses is limited to 20 participants.
If you would like to receive a reminder to register for these courses, please email your contact information to Dr. H Russell Bernard.
Am I required to have any special computer skills for these online courses?
You must have regular access to a computer and be familiar with routine computer skills, such as Windows, email, basic typing, and internet browsing. The use of specialized software for data collection and data analysis is part of what you will learn in these courses.
What computer programs and equipment do I need?
A microphone is required (preferably a headset). A webcam is strongly suggested.
Consult the official University of Florida computer and software requirements for general recommendation and a sample computer configuration.
Where can I go for computer support?
Online help for Canvas (the computer application used to run the online courses) is available at the UF E-Learning Help page.
For more computer trouble shooting tips and login advice, please email the UF Help Desk or call (352) 392-HELP.
Will a slow typist get behind in class?
The only time a slow typist may have a little trouble is in a chat session, but even this disadvantage is not a big deal. Otherwise, slow typists should do fine, even though they may of course require a little more time to finish some assignments and/or projects.
Eduardo Brondizio is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for the Analysis of Social-Ecological Landscapes (CASEL) at Indiana University. Since the late 1980s, Brondizio has maintained an active interdisciplinary research program in the Amazon focusing on small farmers, household economy and demography, institutions, and land use change, and more recently, on rural-urban networks, urban vulnerability to climate change, and the impact of expanding inter-urban networks on rural and indigenous areas. His research approach integrates ethnographic and historical investigation, household surveys, ethnobotanical methods, with remote sensing, GIS, network analysis, and diverse modeling techniques. He has contributed to several regional and global assessments and is currently Co-Chair of the Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2016-2019) of the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
Tracy Van Holt is the Director of Academic Research at NYU Stern’s Center for Sustainable Business, where she draws upon 15+ years’ research experience focused on food systems, landscapes, and commodity chains. She incorporates expert knowledge, networks, big data, spatial analyses, and remotely-sensed data in her work. Prior to NYU, Tracy was a Senior Researcher at the Swedish Royal Academy of Science, Marine Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center, and an assistant professor in Geography at East Carolina University. Van Holt is experienced in geospatial analyses including land cover classification, change detection, topographic correction, and rule-based classification. She integrates ecological data in her work, along with content analysis, social network analysis, qualitative comparative analysis and cultural consensus analysis.
Melissa Beresford is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Her research investigates how people adapt to structures of power and inequality in economic systems, including how people imagine and enact alternative economies and how alternative and diverse economies allow people to secure livelihood, acquire fundamental resources (e.g. water, food), and strive for social change. Her work in these areas has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Arizona State University. Her current research, based in Cape Town, South Africa, examines how entrepreneurs across the South Africa's economic landscape are attempting to develop new economic realities in the context of the country's incomplete post-apartheid economic transformation. She has taught text analysis courses and workshops as a part of the NSF-supported Research Methods in Anthropology training program since 2014.
Amber Wutich is Professor of Anthropology and Senior Sustainability Scientist at Arizona State University. She holds affiliate appointments at the Global Institute for Sustainability, Center for Global Health and Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at ASU. Dr. Wutich received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida and was a postdoctoral scholar in the National Science Foundation Long-term Ecological Research program in Central Arizona-Phoenix. Her research examines the limits of human adaptability to water scarcity, food insecurity, and climate change. She directs the Global Ethnohydrology Study, a multi-year study of cultural knowledge of water and climate conducted in 10 countries. Dr. Wutich teaches ethnographic field methods at ASU and taught text analysis for the National Science Foundation Short Courses Program on Research Methods for faculty in cultural anthropology.
Clarence (Lance) Gravlee is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida, where he also holds affiliate appointments in the Center for Latin American Studies, the African American Studies Program, and the Department of Behavioral Science and Community Health. Gravlee is a medical anthropologist who takes a critical biocultural approach to health and human development. His research focuses on the social and cultural context of racial inequalities in health, with an emphasis on stress and racism in the African Diaspora. Gravlee is former Editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2013–2016) and co-editor (with H. Russell Bernard) of the recent Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. He received the 2010 Rudolph Virchow Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology for his paper, "How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality."
Rosalyn Negron is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, specializing in urban social anthropology. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Florida in 2007. Her research deals with the interpersonal dimensions of ethnicity in diverse cities, with a special focus on social interaction and social networks. Her work bridges substantive and methodological areas, including social network analysis, sociolinguistics, health disparities, and disparities in STEM participation, for which she was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She teaches ethnographic and transdisciplinary research methods at UMass Boston and taught the NSF-funded short course on Cultural Domain Analysis for three years.
H. Russell Bernard received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Florida and Director of the Institute for Social Science Research at Arizona State University. Bernard has done research in Greece, Mexico, and the United States and has taught or done research at universities in the U.S., Greece, Japan, and Germany. Bernard’s areas of research include technology and social change, language death, and social network analysis. From 1987 to 2016, Bernard participated in summer courses, sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, on research methods and research design. Bernard was the 2003 recipient of the Franz Boas Award from the American Anthropological Association and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Clarence (Lance) Gravlee is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida, where he also holds affiliate appointments in the Center for Latin American Studies, the African American Studies Program, and the Department of Behavioral Science and Community Health. Gravlee is a medical anthropologist who takes a critical biocultural approach to health and human development. His research focuses on the social and cultural context of racial inequalities in health, with an emphasis on stress and racism in the African Diaspora. Gravlee is former Editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2013–2016) and co-editor (with H. Russell Bernard) of the recent Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. He received the 2010 Rudolph Virchow Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology for his paper, "How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality."
If you wish to pay for and participate in any of these courses, but do not wish to earn university credit, you may register using the links below next to each course. Upon completion of the following non-credit courses, you will receive a certificate of completion.