Interviewing Plan

The purpose of this letter is to inform you of our plans to conduct additional research under the generic clearance for questionnaire pretesting research (OMB number 0607-0725). In our June 8, 2007 letter to you, we discussed our plans to conduct in-depth interviews with business respondents to support the development of a redesigned Survey of Industrial Research & Development (SIRD), newly renamed the Business Research and Development Survey (BRDS). The main goal of our testing is to get respondent feedback on issues related to the redesigned SIRD questionnaire, Form BRD-1.

We have completed 42 of 5 rounds of cognitive testing (with 15-250 respondents each round), each round lasting 3 months (2 months in the field, plus a month for summarizing, debriefing and planning the next round). A sixth round is scheduled as a debriefing round following the pilot, planned for early 2009. Although our first four rounds have been quite successful, we would like to meet with some additional Top 50 R&D companies to better understand if they have any additional concerns with reporting on the revised form. Therefore, we are requesting additional burden hours for the round five interviews. We would like to add 15-20 additional respondents.

We plan to focus the additional interviews on the top R&D performers from the current SIRD. The respondents will be sent the redesigned questionnaire prior to each interview and asked to consider how they would gather the information necessary to answer the survey. We are hoping that they will involve all the potential respondents for the five sections of the form. During the interviews, we will inquire about the process, focusing on specific questions relevant to the respondent(s).

We have enclosed a current draft of the questionnaire to be sent to the additional respondents (and also used for the original Round 5 panel respondents).

All other aspects of the research remain as presented in the June 8 letter.

For these Top 50 R&D respondents wWe still estimate that each interview will take approximately 2 hours with up to an additional and 6 hours to prepare for the interview. Thus, the total additional burden for the Top 50 R&D companies is 160 hours. (4 rounds X 2 hours X 15 respondents per round )

The contact person for questions regarding data collection and statistical aspects of the design of this research is:

Kristin Stettler

Establishment Survey Methods Staff

OSMREP

Room 7K132A

U.S. Census Bureau

Washington, D.C. 20233

(301) 763-7596

kristin.j.stettler@census.gov