Wealth Ranking

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.