The following appeared in an article written by Dr. Karp, an anthropologist.
"Twenty years ago, Dr. Field, a noted anthropologist, visited the island of Tertia and concluded from his observations that children in Tertia were reared by an entire village rather than by their own biological parents. However, my recent interviews with children living in the group of islands that includes Tertia show that these children spend much more time talking about their biological parents than about other adults in the village. This research of mine proves that Dr. Field's conclusion about Tertian village culture is invalid and thus that the observation-centered approach to studying cultures is invalid as well. The interview-centered method that my team of graduate students is currently using in Tertia will establish a much more accurate understanding of child-rearing traditions there and in other island cultures."
Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.
The author in the statement presents an argument to refuse a method for anthropological studies. He or she emphasizes that just one faulty result of a research on Tertia’s people leads to falsification of the method by which Dr. Field managed the research. But there are some dubious points that weaken Dr. Karp’s argument.
First of all, Dr. Karp cannot refute the observation-centered approach just because it led to one false result. It is a kind of generalization that tries to criticize a method based on one malfunction of its implementation. However, it is not still clear that Dr. Field’s study was certainly mistaken. It is possible that Dr. Karp’s results are wrong. We need more evidence to justify Dr. Karp’s claim concerning the understanding of child-rearing behaviors in Tertia. If these evidences prove the veracity of this theory, then we can argue against Dr. Field’s studies; though we cannot still put the blame on its method.
Dr. Karp’s argument has another faulty aspect. The interviews will not per se prove that children are more reared with their biological parents. That is because they just talk more about them, while there is no clue to indicate that their bio-parents took more care of them than other members of the Tertia tribe. It is imaginable that children tend to talk about their biological parents because they are just more respectable in Tertia’s tradition.
One still can reasonably cast doubt on the validity of the interviews, while students are those who handle them. Maybe Dr. Field’s observations, as a more prominent scholar, are more reliable than those of graduate students of Dr. Karp. It is probable that these students tended to pay more attention to those aspects of interviews that center on issues concerned with family members and biological parents of interviewees. The background assumptions and knowledge of interviewers have a decisive role in handling the data in a research. They need to have a critical attitude toward their presuppositions, as someone who are probably a person from modern families with different structures of society comparing with Tertia’s. Thus, it is possible that interviewers’ assumption misled them to cast similar results to their own family and parenting behavior, on these interviews.
Considering all of these points, including the methodological defeats, one can legitimately cast doubt on Dr. Karp’s argument in refuting Dr. Field’s theory. Dr. Karp needs to form a more solid study on Tertia’s society to be able to refute the rival theory. Nevertheless, that will not be a permission yet to refuse the rival theory’s methodology, as Dr. Karp tries to conclude so.
Post date | Users | Rates | Link to Content |
---|---|---|---|
2019-11-12 | Devendra Prasad Chalise | 16 | view |
2019-07-21 | Marcello | 89 | view |
2019-06-28 | kap | 50 | view |
2019-06-07 | Gh.Ne | 55 | view |
2018-10-22 | avinash2618 | 83 | view |
- To improve the quality of education, universities should spend more money on salaries for university professors. Agree or disagree? 77
- Because the world is changing so quickly people now are less happy or less satisfied with their lives than people were in the past 88
- The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station."Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this period, most of the complaint 50
- The following is taken from a memo from the advertising director of the Super Screen Movie Production Company."According to a recent report from our marketing department, during the past year, fewer people attended Super Screen-produced movies than in any 40
- "Governments are justified in circumventing civil laws when doing so is vital to the protection of national security. "Write an essay in which you take a position on the statement above. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways 80
as someone who are probably a person
as someone who is probably a person
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
argument 1 -- Better: it is too presumptuous to conclude that Dr. Field’s observation-centered method is bias because there is a twenty years’ blank between two studies.
argument 2 -- not OK.
argument 3 -- OK
read a good sample:
http://www.testbig.com/gmatgre-argument-task-essays/twenty-years-ago-dr…
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 3.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 1 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 21 15
No. of Words: 433 350
No. of Characters: 2187 1500
No. of Different Words: 213 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.562 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.051 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.923 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 159 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 117 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 88 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 50 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 20.619 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.152 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.429 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.327 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.535 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.152 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5