Between December 1984 and July 1986, the Planning Division of the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Development, in conjunction with the Rural Development Studies Bureau of the University of Zambia and Iowa State University conducted a rural household survey. This is referred to as the ZATPID I Rural Household Survey, because it was conducted during phase I of ZATPID, a five year USAID/Zambia project. ZATPID stands for Zambia Agricultural Training, Planning and Institutional Developmental Project. The aim of the survey was to provide data for use in analysis to inform policy making in Zambia. It was also supposed to provide a data bank for use by Zambian graduate students to meet the research requirements of their degree programs. The objectives of the study are: 1) to review the methods and survey procedures used in the RHS; 2) to complete internal and logical consistency checks on the data base resulting from the 477 households surveyed in the flow portion of the RHS in order to identify the number of likely cases of valid information; 3) to select a subsample of households producing maize and to conduct a comparison of selected smallholder maize production characteristics; and 4) to discuss the implications of the findings of both the consistency checks and the comparative analysis, and to recommend further cleaning and/or analysis of the data set.