The purpose of this study was to review the design and implementation of food security research in Mali, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, Zimbabwe during the first and selected later phases of the Food Security in Africa Cooperative Agreement between Michigan State University and the U.S. Agency for International Development. This paper discusses principles and techniques for designing research, formulating questions and developing questionnaires, conducting the field work, and disseminating the findings. The primary objective was to learn from the experiences of prior researchers and to synthesize the research methods that this project has found to be effective and which may be useful to future researchers in the development and execution of policy-relevant field research.