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Because Yoder published tables of raw data from the mothers’ descriptions, he and collaborators were later able to extend the analysis using other methods. Ryan et al. (2000) conceptualized Yoder’s data as a series of linked lists. Yoder had collected 106 descriptions of the six illnesses. In each description, women discussed the symptoms, causes, and treatments associated with the illness. Ryan et al. converted women’s descriptions into a set of matrices that indicated whether a particular symptom, cause, or treatment was mentioned in each illness description.

Figure 4.5 illustrates the steps in analyzing the relationship between illness and symptoms. The list on the left indicates which symptoms were associated with each description. For example, the women in the first group said that kuhara was associated with frequent stools, vomiting, fever, and no appetite. The matrix on the upper-right converts the textual data into a series of ones (if a symptom was mentioned) and zeros (if it was not). This matrix contains all the information in women’s original descriptions about which symptoms go with which illnesses – although the table of ones and zeros hardly clarifies anything on its on. The trick is that, once the data are in this format, Ryan et al. could use correspondence analysis (Weller and Romney 1990) to visualize the relationships between illness descriptions and symptoms.