Peer Evaluation Can Reliably Measure Local Knowledge

Research output: Journal contributionsScientific review articlesResearch

Authors

  • Victoria Reyes-García
  • Isabel Díaz Reviriego
  • Romain Duda
  • Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares
  • Sandrine Gallois
  • Maximilien Guèze
  • Lucentezza Napitupulu
  • Aili Pyhälä

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 languageEnglish
JournalField Methods
Volume28
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)345-362
Number of pages18
ISSN1525-822X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.11.2016
Externally publishedYes

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.

DOI

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