Peer Evaluation Can Reliably Measure Local Knowledge
Research output: Journal contributions › Scientific review articles › Research
Authors
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Field Methods |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Pages (from-to) | 345-362 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| ISSN | 1525-822X |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 01.11.2016 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
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.
- Ecosystems Research