ABSTRACT
Administering a survey is a routine task for a well-organized survey institute in which all procedures and tasks are standardized and supported by units of verification (validation), editing, coding, and keypunching, in addition to field offices and supervisory personnel. But for the first-timer, a field survey is conceptually one of the simplest tasks in research because nothing is beyond commonsense understanding. As long as its implementation follows the prescribed procedure, it seems almost nothing can go wrong. Unfortunately, Murphy's law generally applies: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong in a field survey, despite our elaborate design and preparation, because a field survey using personal interviews is far more complicated than a mail or telephone survey. In order to streamline the whole operation of the field survey, we identify four stages and 14 specific steps for its smooth implementation, as discussed here and as shown in Fig. 9.1.
