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Dressler’s (2005, 2020) research on culture, stress, and health also illustrates the progression from exploratory to confirmatory research questions. The central thread of Dressler’s work is to identify how culturally meaningful aspects of social status shape the distribution of stress-related health outcomes. This objective entails (a) a set of exploratory research questions about how social status is culturally constructed in specific times and places and (b) confirmatory research questions about the relationship between locally meaningful aspects of social status and health. This example illustrates the interdependence of exploratory and confirmatory questions in medical anthropology. Dressler drew on existing theory to anticipate an association between social status and health. This theory – and substantial empirical evidence – justified confirmatory, hypothesis-testing research, but Dressler first adapted the general theory to specific ethnographic contexts through exploratory research. Dressler refers to this strategy, which depends on working across the exploratory–confirmatory continuum, as “the ethnographic critique of theory” (Dressler 1995, p. 45).