Spot Observation Sampling
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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Gross, D. R. (1984). Time allocation: a tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 519–558. · DOI 10.1146/annurev.an.13.100184.002519
- Altmann, J. (1974). Observational study of behavior: sampling methods. Behaviour, 49(3–4), 227–267. · DOI 10.1163/156853974X00534
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.