Compare methods

	Spot Observation Sampling	Participatory Mapping
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1984	1994
Originator	Time-allocation tradition in cultural anthropology (synthesized by Gross)	Participatory rural appraisal tradition (Chambers)
Type	Instantaneous sampling procedure for estimating time allocation	Participatory method in which community members produce maps of their own space
Seminal source	Gross, D. R. (1984). Time allocation: a tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 519–558.	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
Aliases	Spot Check Sampling, Instantaneous Spot Observation, Random Spot Checks, Spot Sampling	Community Mapping, Participatory GIS, PGIS, Counter-Mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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.