Rapid Anthropological Procedures for Community-Based Assessment and Analysis.

Key characteristics of rapid anthropological procedures (RAP), its uses, and its relationship with participatory research are discussed. RAP is defined as a set of anthropological information collection techniques that provides researchers, social scientists and health workers with guidelines for assessing local conditions and needs, understanding attitudes of the community. RAP usually employs: limited participant observation, direct observation, informal conversation, ethnographic interviewing of key informants and survey interviewing. RAP is considered to be particularly important at the diagnostic stage of project development since the iterative nature of its questions enable answers to be the basis for other more culturally relevant questions.