Compare methods

	Wealth Ranking	Transect Walk
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	Systematic observational walk along a line across a community with local informants
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	Transect Diagram, Walking Transect, Transect Survey, Cross-Section Walk
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 transect walk is a participatory rural appraisal tool in which researchers and local informants walk together along a deliberately chosen line that cuts across the main land-use zones of a community, systematically observing and recording what they see. As they move from, say, riverbank to fields to settlement to hillside, they note soils, vegetation, crops, water, livestock, infrastructure, and the problems and opportunities of each zone. The walk culminates in a transect diagram — a cross-sectional sketch that summarizes how resources and constraints change along the route.