Compare methods

	Participatory Mapping	Spot Observation Sampling
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	1984
Originator	Participatory rural appraisal tradition (Chambers)	Time-allocation tradition in cultural anthropology (synthesized by Gross)
Type	Participatory method in which community members produce maps of their own space	Instantaneous sampling procedure for estimating time allocation
Seminal source	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.	Gross, D. R. (1984). Time allocation: a tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 519–558.
Aliases	Community Mapping, Participatory GIS, PGIS, Counter-Mapping	Spot Check Sampling, Instantaneous Spot Observation, Random Spot Checks, Spot Sampling
Related	4	4
Summary	Participatory mapping is a family of methods in which community members themselves create maps of their territory, resources, land use, and boundaries — sketched on the ground or paper, drawn to scale, or built in a geographic information system. Rather than the researcher mapping the community from outside, local people hold the pen, so the map encodes their own spatial knowledge, categories, and claims. The products range from rough sketch maps made in an afternoon to participatory GIS (PGIS) layers that can stand in formal land negotiations.	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.