The survey sample was drawn from a comprehensive list (maintained by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division), of 1,860 urban agglomerations in 156 countries with a minimum population threshold of 300,000. Within each urban agglomeration, one municipality (or its political-administrative equivalent), with the largest population was selected to represent the urban agglomeration. The survey sample included 1,012 randomly selected municipalities in 125 countries and represented all of the major geographic regions of the world.

The survey instrument and supporting materials were translated into 23 languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Cantonese, Filipino, French, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Telugu, Turkish, Thai, Urdu, and Vietnamese. The survey is implemented in Qualtrics. The outreach effort and data collection were conducted by email, mail, phone, fax, WhatsApp, and social media from January to September 2022.