Σύγκριση μεθόδων

	Time Allocation Study	Spot Observation Sampling
Πεδίο	Anthropology	Anthropology
Οικογένεια	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Έτος προέλευσης	1984	1984
Δημιουργός	Ecological and economic anthropology (synthesized by Gross)	Time-allocation tradition in cultural anthropology (synthesized by Gross)
Τύπος	Research design for characterizing how people allocate time across activities	Instantaneous sampling procedure for estimating time allocation
Θεμελιώδης πηγή	Gross, D. R. (1984). Time allocation: a tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 519–558.	Gross, D. R. (1984). Time allocation: a tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 519–558.
Εναλλακτικές ονομασίες	Time Allocation Research, Time Use Study, Time Budget Study, Activity Allocation Study	Spot Check Sampling, Instantaneous Spot Observation, Random Spot Checks, Spot Sampling
Συναφείς	4	4
Σύνοψη	A time-allocation study is an anthropological research design that measures how people distribute their time across the activities of daily life — subsistence, domestic work, child care, leisure, ritual, and rest — in order to characterize a community's economy and way of life quantitatively. Data are gathered by directly observing what people do (through random spot checks or continuous focal observation) or by collecting recall diaries, and the activities are then expressed as shares of the total time budget. The result is an empirical portrait of how labor and leisure are organized and divided.	Spot observation sampling is a time-allocation technique in which an observer arrives at randomly chosen moments and records, instantaneously, exactly what each visible person is doing at that instant — not what they were doing before or after. Because the moments are sampled at random across the daily and seasonal round, the proportion of spot observations that fall in a given activity is an unbiased estimate of the proportion of time people spend in that activity. It turns a scatter of brief snapshots into a quantitative budget of how a community allocates its waking hours.