Anthropological Household Survey

An anthropological household survey is a structured or semi-structured, census-style instrument administered to the households of a community to record their composition, economy, and assets in a standardized form. Taking the household rather than the individual as the unit of analysis, it captures who lives together, how they are related, what they own and produce, and how they make a living. Whether applied as a full census of every household or to a representative sample, it turns the texture of community life into comparable, aggregable data that complement participant observation.