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.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill amanthro-research-design --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# 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` ## Ethnographic / qualitative (first-class at AA) - **Fieldwork design.** State the site(s), duration, language(s) of work, and your access — and how each shaped what was observable. Participant observation is a method with a logic, not just "being there"; say what kinds of evidence it generates. - **Sampling of cases/interlocutors** justified by design logic
- When to trigger
- Ethnographic / qualitative (first-class at AA)
- Archival / material analysis
- Biological / physical anthropology (quantitative/lab)
- Multimodal / participatory design
- The adjudication test (AA-specific)
- Anti-patterns
- Output format
- Supplementary resources
What does the amanthro-research-design skill do?
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.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill amanthro-research-design --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.