Compare methods

	Wealth Ranking	Seasonal Calendar
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	1994
Originator	Participatory Rural Appraisal tradition (Robert Chambers and colleagues)	Participatory Rural Appraisal tradition (Robert Chambers and colleagues)
Type	Participatory stratification of households by locally defined wealth or wellbeing	Participatory visualization of intra-annual variation across activities and conditions
Seminal source	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
Aliases	Wellbeing Ranking, Wealth Ranking Card Sort, Social Stratification Ranking, Wealth Grouping	Seasonal Calendar Diagramming, Seasonality Diagram, Seasonal Activity Matrix, Seasonal Mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	Wealth ranking is a participatory rural appraisal technique in which knowledgeable community members sort cards representing local households into a set of wealth or wellbeing strata that they themselves define. Several informants each perform the sort independently, and because they may use different numbers of piles, their placements are converted to a common scale and averaged into a relative wealth score for every household. The procedure produces both a stratification of the community and, crucially, the local (emic) criteria people actually use to judge who is poor and who is well off.	A seasonal calendar is a participatory rural appraisal (PRA) tool in which community members chart how key conditions and activities vary across the months or seasons of a typical year on a shared visual matrix. Rows represent variables such as rainfall, crop labour, income, food availability, migration, illness, or expenditure, while columns represent the local division of the year. By filling the cells with stones, marks, or piles whose size shows intensity, participants produce a collective picture of seasonality that reveals when stresses pile up and when slack periods occur.