Budgeting household surveys

Great care must be taken when creating a survey budget. Experience shows there is a tendency to overlook or undervalue the costs of certain activities, such as training of field staff or analysis, archiving, and dissemination of microdata. Survey budgets depend on local conditions in each country and specificity of each survey. Before the budget can be prepared, one must understand the size of the sample, the period during which data will be collected, and the length of the interview. There are ways, however, of structuring budgets and timelines that are common to all household survey operations. The objective of this project is to provide generic guidelines for structuring such budgets.