Individual skill
amanthro-research-design
Use when defending the research design of an American Anthropologist (AA) manuscript — fieldwork and participant observation, interview and archival design for ethnographic/qualitative work, material/contextual analysis for archaeology, and appropriate lab/quantitative design for biological anthropology. AA judges each mode on its own terms with reflexivity. Strengthens the design; it does not write code or run fieldwork.
American-Anthropologist-Skills/skills/amanthro-research-design/SKILL.md
Source commit 932eb23331721b16e967c59f093781be1928b498
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- Matches the observed repository HEAD
- Yes
- Scanner rules are current
- Yes
- Repository scan complete
- No
- Skill scan complete
- Yes
- Observed behavior
- Network or broad shell
- Last checked
- Nov 9, 2026
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Repository context
- Repository stars (not skill ratings)
- 1,405
- Repository last updated
- Sep 27, 2026
- License
- MIT
Observed agent integration: No specific integration evidence. Standard SKILL.md installation does not imply verified compatibility.
- academic-writing Repository topic
- agent-skills Repository topic
- journal Repository topic
- academic-research Repository topic
- ai-agents Repository topic
- anthropic Repository topic
- awesome-list Repository topic
- claude Repository topic
- claude-code Repository topic
- economics Repository topic
- design Derived category
- research Derived category
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SKILL.mdcore · 4,788 bytes
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# Research Design (amanthro-research-design)
AA accepts many methodologies but is demanding about each. The design must credibly connect the
argument (`amanthro-theory-building`) to evidence — and at AA, **ethnographic and qualitative inference
is first-class**, not a soft substitute for statistics. This skill is mode-aware: pick the section that
matches your work and defend it against the strongest alternative reading, reflexively and ethically.
## When to trigger
- Specifying fieldwork, sampling of sites/interlocutors, archive or material selection, or lab design
- A reviewer questioned your evidence, generalization, confound, or interpretive leap
- Planning consent, anonymization, and community accountability into the design
- Justifying why your evidence adjudicates the rival reading from `amanthro-literature-positioning`
