This method involves research participants listing what they know or think about the researcher’s topic. This book incorporates free-list analyses with other analytical methods and demonstrates their broad applicability. The book starts with descriptive methods, then outlines a predictive statistical framework. The author explains how to collect, clean, and manage free-list data and how to use R to calculate and visualize them.

An innovative research methods book that provides a step-by-step guide to the popular R software. Researchers of any social scientific discipline will benefit tremendously from procedural knowledge in transforming conventionally qualitative data into quantitative reasoning. -- Kenneth C. C. Yang

Benjamin Grant Purzycki is Associate Professor at Aarhus University. He is a cognitive and evolutionary cultural anthropologist and focuses on the causal role of various demographic and cultural factors on human cooperation. He has conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic (Russia) and managed large, cross-cultural projects. His most recent books include The Minds of Gods: New Horizons in the Naturalistic Study of Religion (Bloomsbury), Ethnographic Free-List Data (Sage), and Morality and the Gods (Cambridge University Press). Personal website: www.bgpurzycki.wordpress.com