TY - JOUR

T1 - Peer Evaluation Can Reliably Measure Local Knowledge

AU - Reyes-García, Victoria

AU - Díaz Reviriego, Isabel

AU - Duda, Romain

AU - Fernández-Llamazares, Álvaro

AU - Gallois, Sandrine

AU - Guèze, Maximilien

AU - Napitupulu, Lucentezza

AU - Pyhälä, Aili

N1 - The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement number FP7-261971-LEK to Reyes-García.

PY - 2016/11/1

Y1 - 2016/11/1

N2 - We assess the consistency of measures of individual local ecological knowledge obtained through peer evaluation against three standard measures: identification tasks, structured questionnaires, and self-reported skills questionnaires. We collected ethnographic information among the Baka (Congo), the Punan (Borneo), and the Tsimane’ (Amazon) to design site-specific but comparable tasks to measure medicinal plant and hunting knowledge. Scores derived from peer ratings correlate with scores of identification tasks and self-reported skills questionnaires. The higher the number of people rating a subject, the larger the association. Associations were larger for the full sample than for subsamples with high and low rating scores. Peer evaluation can provide a more affordable method in terms of difficulty, time, and budget to study intracultural variation of knowledge, provided that researchers (1) do not aim to describe local knowledge; (2) select culturally recognized domains of knowledge; and (3) use a large and diverse (age, sex, and kinship) group of evaluators.

AB - We assess the consistency of measures of individual local ecological knowledge obtained through peer evaluation against three standard measures: identification tasks, structured questionnaires, and self-reported skills questionnaires. We collected ethnographic information among the Baka (Congo), the Punan (Borneo), and the Tsimane’ (Amazon) to design site-specific but comparable tasks to measure medicinal plant and hunting knowledge. Scores derived from peer ratings correlate with scores of identification tasks and self-reported skills questionnaires. The higher the number of people rating a subject, the larger the association. Associations were larger for the full sample than for subsamples with high and low rating scores. Peer evaluation can provide a more affordable method in terms of difficulty, time, and budget to study intracultural variation of knowledge, provided that researchers (1) do not aim to describe local knowledge; (2) select culturally recognized domains of knowledge; and (3) use a large and diverse (age, sex, and kinship) group of evaluators.

KW - Ecosystems Research

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84990180127&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/1525822X16629912

DO - 10.1177/1525822X16629912

M3 - Scientific review articles

AN - SCOPUS:84990180127

VL - 28

SP - 345

EP - 362

JO - Field Methods

JF - Field Methods

SN - 1525-822X

IS - 4

ER -