ABSTRACT
A pilot survey is a scaled-down version of the full survey. One simply: collect a small portion of the data; stop his survey; assess how it has gone; and modify the full survey as required before undertaking it. This is a good thing to do if one is not particularly experienced at designing sample surveys. A pilot survey should not take too long to do, but should cover sufficient subjects. Typically for a large-scale survey, having a sample size of some several thousand subjects taking several months to complete, a pilot survey covering a few hundred subjects over one or two weeks would be appropriate. A small-scale survey, having a sample size of 100 subjects taking one day to complete, would probably only need five subjects or so, taking about 30 minutes to do. The completed pilot survey shows that there are no major changes required to the full survey.
