In just under a week, 6 000 field workers from Statistics South Africa, using more than 1 800 vehicles, will fan out over the country and collect information on 280 000 households.
For Stats SA, and for the country as a whole, this is no ordinary statistical survey. It is the largest sample survey ever undertaken in South Africa.
The information it seeks to gather will be used not only to measure and monitor our progress as a society, but to compare our development successes and failures to those of other countries.
Field work is central to any survey. Nothing can compensate for poor quality, or inadequate information gathered in the field, and that is why preparation for and management of field work is one of the defining elements in a survey.
For the community survey, management of field work involves two distinct levels.
A central structure based at Stats SA's head office in Pretoria is made up of a group of core professionals, the majority of whom were employed on a permanent basis to develop, review and conduct the 2007 Community Survey and the 2011 Population Census.
Decentralised structures in each of the nine provinces are staffed by temporary personnel specifically recruited to conduct field work during the survey. These include provincial and district survey co-ordinators to co-ordinate the data collection exercise, district office staff to support the data collection exercise and field staff responsible for collecting the data in the field.
Extensive training of all personnel has been a priority, and more than 300 trainers have conducted courses at 74 different venues across the country.
Ten days of national training, eight days of provincial training and seven days of training personnel at district level focused on presentation and facilitation skills, the contents of the survey questionnaire, enumeration (to determine the number of or compile a list) procedures, quality assurance, map reading skills and administrative and logistical issues.
Field workers have to be prepared for the many complex situations they might face while gathering information. For example, they have to be able to distinguish between different sorts of dwellings.
Different approaches are employed for enumeration in different dwellings.
Field workers have to be able to distinguish between structures privately occupied by a household; special dwellings such as hotels/motels, hospitals/nursing homes, prisons/reformatories, old age homes, retirement villages and boarding schools; and identify the appropriate enumeration methodology for each of these cases.
A special enumeration approach had to be developed for hostels, which are characterised as single person or converted family unit accommodation, consisting of a cluster of buildings. If a hostel has separate rooms for families who cater for themselves, then these rooms are listed separately and treated as private dwelling units.
But if the rooms or dormitories are mostly for single people who eat in a common place, then they are treated as part of special dwellings for example, the beds are listed individually.
During field work, the canvassing method of enumeration will be used where the enumerator will conduct an interview with the respondent while simultaneously completing the questionnaire.
A period of three weeks has been assigned for data collection and an additional week to follow up on incidents where enumerators were not able to make contact with a household (a non-contact is defined as a situation where an enumerator has been unable to make contact after at least three visits to the dwelling on different days, at different times).
Enumerators will confront many difficult situations. For example, access to high-walled security estates and town house complexes often presents problems, as does access to farms, informal settlements and villages in deep rural areas.
But enumerators are not on their own. They will be working in more than 1 000 teams of four, which are in turned supervised by 1 187 field work supervisors. They are in turn managed by 236 co-ordinators, who are responsible to 55 district survey co-ordinators, who report to nine provincial co-ordinators.
The community survey is a massive and complex undertaking. But the highly trained field workers, sound statistical methodologies and the good field work management and supervision required to deliver quality data are in place.
Word from the "trenches" of statistical production is that the teams are eagerly anticipating the moment when they take to the field next week.