As a federal statistical agency, the U.S. Census Bureau is responsible for collecting and distributing information on the people and the economy of the United States. Although response rates to Census Bureau surveys are quite high (above 90%), in recent years, response rates to these surveys have been declining (Bates, 2006). This trend reflects the increasing difficulty of collecting survey data due to several key factors: the lifestyle, mobility, and increase in cell-phone only households that make it more difficult to locate and make contact with potential respondents; and the increasing privacy and confidentiality concerns that make it difficult to gain the public’s cooperation with large-scale government surveys. We have begun a comprehensive exploration of survey participation from both the respondent and interviewer perspectives, using multiple methods. First, we intend to develop a basic understanding of survey data collection from the interviewer perspective through exploratory pilot studies. We also intend to use existing survey data to describe a current picture of survey response and survey nonresponse through the relationship between survey respondent characteristics, interviewer characteristics, and general geographical characteristics. Finally, our efforts will involve developing a research program of lab-based experiments that will explore the effectiveness of different respondent and interviewer interactions and the effect of these interactions on cooperation and survey participation. In the current paper, we present the results of our initial exploratory efforts at gaining an understanding of survey data collection on a large-scale, federally-sponsored survey.