The Côte d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey (CILSS) was the first LSMS Survey to have field tested the methodology and questionnaire developed by LSMS. It consists of three complementary surveys: the household survey, the community survey and the price survey. The household survey collected detailed information on expenditures, income, employment, assets, basic needs and other socio-economic characteristics of the households. The Community Survey collected information on economic and demographic characteristics of the rural communities to which each cluster of households belonged. This was designed to enable the linkage of community level with household level data. The price survey component of the CILSS collected data on prices at the nearest market to each cluster of households, so that regional price indices could be constructed for the household survey.
The Côte d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey (CILSS) was undertaken over a period of four years, 1985-88, by the Direction de la Statistique in Côte d'Ivoire, with financial and technical support from the World Bank during the first two years of the survey. It was the first year-round household survey to have been undertaken by the Ivorian Direction de la Statistique.
The sample size each year was 1600 households and the sample design was a rotating panel. That is, half of the households were revisited the following year, while the other half were replaced with new households. The survey thus produced four cross-sectional data sets as well as three overlapping panels of 800 households each (1985-86, 1986-87, 1987-88).