Etic

Conceptual Overview

The frequent link of etic viewpoints to outsider viewpoint follows from Pike's work as a field linguist. Field linguists enter societies that have languages with no written form. As outsiders, they have prior theory, scientific methods and observations, and a capacity to induce from direct experience. They begin by applying the prior tools to see what linguistic sounds members of the unfamiliar society find meaningful. Anything from the prior etic base found meaningful is then said to have an emic (see emic) meaning in the unfamiliar society. Misunderstandings or communication failures indicate that the society's members are responding to something that the outsider analyst does not notice. Misunderstanding suggests an area where inductive work is needed that relies on human abilities to intuit.

Pike viewed an etic starting point as essential for beginners to approach an unfamiliar situation or society, but viewed etic knowledge as inadequate to fully function in a society. Newcomers use prior etic theory as a basis for contrast with direct observation of the unfamiliar situation. Contrasts raise questions and stimulate inductive analysis that depends on the human capacity to use intuition to explicate experience (see emic). Pike describes how to use etic systems to start analyzing new situations and use lessons from new situations to improve etic systems.

Berry applied Pike's view of etic analysis to questionnaire research in a way that stays faithful to Pike's intent. When scholars apply an existing survey to a new society, they take an imposed etic approach. The contrasts with prior research that appear when the questionnaire data are statistically analyzed provide the basis to develop a derived etic. Some scholars extend this logic to suggest how inductive methods can be used to redesign a questionnaire before using it in a new setting. Others depart from Pike's use to argue that an imposed etic approach is inappropriate or that etic research is limited to that which identifies commonalities among societies.

The nuances of Pikes meaning of etic are affected by his work to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of linguistic sounds. His phonetic taxonomy included both qualities of sounds that are common to most languages and those unique to particular linguistic groups. He was particularly interested in tonality among the indigenous languages of southwestern North America. Representing them required that Pike augment prior linguistic research by developing methods that take advantage of the perceptual and psychological processes that scientists use to create [Page 479]abstractions from observation. Pike observed that applying prior theory to tonal languages identified contrasts, points of inadequacy in the prior theory that encouraged him to induce from observation.

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