Emic Approach

Definition

An emic approach investigates how local people think: how they perceive and categorize the world, what has meaning for them, and how they explain things. The account it produces is one that members of the community would recognize as an account of their own reasoning.

Its counterpart is the etic approach, which uses categories the researcher brings from outside, chosen for comparison across cases rather than for fidelity to any single one.

Origin

Linguist Kenneth Pike coined both terms in 1954, from the endings of phonemic and phonetic. The analogy is exact. Phonetics describes every sound a human vocal tract can produce, using a notation valid across all languages. Phonemics describes only the sound distinctions that matter to speakers of one particular language, the ones that change meaning. The aspirated and unaspirated p in English pin and spin are phonetically distinct and phonemically identical, because no English speaker hears them as different sounds. In Hindi the same pair distinguishes words.

Pike's argument was that behavior works the same way. A gesture, a kinship term, or a meal can be described exhaustively from outside, or described in terms of the distinctions that participants actually treat as significant.

Marvin Harris brought the terms into anthropology and changed what they were asking. Pike's question was whose categories the description uses: the people being studied, or the researcher. Harris changed the question to who decides whether the description is correct. An emic account is correct if the people being described agree that it captures how they think. An etic account is correct if it holds up to other researchers, whether or not the people being described would accept it.

Method

Emic work rests on long participation, learning the language, and attending to the categories that people use unprompted rather than the ones a questionnaire supplies. The characteristic technique is to ask people to sort, name, and explain, then to build the analysis from their sorting.

This brings up a question about whether a distinction the researcher has drawn makes a difference to the people being studied. A classification that is invisible to participants may still be useful, but it is an etic classification and should be labeled as such.

Harris used the Hindu prohibition on cattle slaughter to show on example of a difference. The emic account is the religious one that Hindu farmers give. The etic account Harris offered is an ecological argument about the value of live cattle for traction, dung, and milk in a smallholding economy. He held that both accounts can be correct at once, and that neither substitutes for the other.

Use in technology research

The emic and etic distinction is the underlying structure of most disagreements in user research, usually without either word being used.

Log data, funnel metrics, and A/B results are etic. They are recorded in categories the analyst defined, they permit comparison across users and across products, and they capture nothing about what any of it meant to the person. Contextual inquiry, diary studies, and open-ended interviews are emic, aimed at how users describe the situation in their own terms.

Etic-only research produces optimization toward a measure nobody cares about, since the metric was chosen before anyone asked what mattered. Emic-only research produces findings that are accurate about individuals and cannot be generalized or compared across releases.

The practical position most industry research takes is Harris's rather than Pike's: gather emic material to find out which distinctions matter, then build etic measures around the distinctions that turn out to be real.

Related Reading

• Etic Approach
• Ethnomethodology
• Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative
• Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches
• The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual
• The Silent Language
• Beyond Culture
• Careers in Digital Anthropology

Key texts

• Pike, Kenneth L. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.
• Harris, Marvin. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Random House, 1979.
• Headland, Thomas N., Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris, eds. Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate. Newbury Park: Sage, 1990.