Confessions of a Fieldworker: How I Stratified a Rural Population

Refering to a previous article, which attempted to assess the accuracy of various relatively rapid means of stratifying a rural population in Bangladesh, this paper argues that that exercise was somewhat premature. Little progress can be made toward improving the efficiency with which succeeding generations of fieldworkers conduct their enquiries, until more is known about the way in which existing practitioners have divided their time and the considerations behind these allocative decisions. The paper offers an account of how a stratification of a rural population in Bangladesh, in the course of fieldwork, was carried out.