Compare methods
Review your selected methods side by side; rows that differ are highlighted.
| Anthropological Household Survey× | Spot Observation Sampling× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Anthropology | Anthropology |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 2017 | 1984 |
| Originator≠ | Survey-research tradition adapted to community fieldwork (Bernard) | Time-allocation tradition in cultural anthropology (synthesized by Gross) |
| Type≠ | Structured survey design taking the household as the unit of analysis | Instantaneous sampling procedure for estimating time allocation |
| Seminal source≠ | Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421 | Gross, D. R. (1984). Time allocation: a tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 519–558. DOI ↗ |
| Aliases | Household Census, Community Household Survey, Household Economic Survey, Household Roster Survey | Spot Check Sampling, Instantaneous Spot Observation, Random Spot Checks, Spot Sampling |
| Related | 4 | 4 |
| Summary≠ | An anthropological household survey is a structured or semi-structured, census-style instrument administered to the households of a community to record their composition, economy, and assets in a standardized form. Taking the household rather than the individual as the unit of analysis, it captures who lives together, how they are related, what they own and produce, and how they make a living. Whether applied as a full census of every household or to a representative sample, it turns the texture of community life into comparable, aggregable data that complement participant observation. | 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. |
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