History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction

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Given the subjective nature of qualitative research, the views of emic and etic play an important role in life history research. The terms "emic" and "etic" were first created by a linguist Kenneth PIKE in 1954 and then expanded in his book "The Relationship between Language and Unified Theory of Human Behavior Structure" (1967) It was. PIKE derives the term "etic" from the word suffix of voice. This is used to study the speech function of the language, regardless of the speech commonly used in human language, especially its meaning. Similarly, "emic" derives from the term "phoneme", which is mainly related to acoustics, extrinsic attributes and semantic meaning (BERRY, POORTINGA, SEGALL & DASEN, 1992; HELFRICH, 1999 ; YIN, 2010). Immediately after they were introduced into linguistics, anthropologist theorist Marvin Harris used "emic" and "etic" in his book "The Culture of Cultural Things" (1964).

Reconsidering the tension between the perspective of Emic and Etic in life history research: lessons learned

Remember that by the end of the 1980's the concept of emic / etic was widely used in areas other than linguistics and anthropology. Of course, today, these terms are commonly used in vocabulary of most anthropologists and proved to be very useful for them. Indeed, today, most practical anthropologists actually use insights into the various views of various subculture groups as a pillar of trading as a conceptual tool, if not mainly. Therefore, the difference between emic / etic is one of the basic contributions of contemporary anthropology to the work world (ie the ability to understand and interpret other cultures). Indeed, if not by other social scientists, many anthropologists can be attributed to their ability to distinguish between emic and etic.

In the 1970s, social scientists gradually changed the use and meaning of emic / etic terminology. As you can imagine, the use of the term emic / etic has increased substantially since the first major research conducted by Parker in 1954 (1967). Even more interesting is that these terms spread to other scientific fields in the 1970s and became common terms in English. This tendency reduces these terms by stepwise incorporation into a concise dictionary (see Table 1.2), 3 popularization of these terms (see Table 1.3) to other field journals, and Parker or someone else In order to reduce the number of authors needed is reflected. When using printed terms (Table 1.4), the number of authors who use printed terms increases without definition or interpretation (Table 1.5) because they think the reader knows and understands the word.