A.8. Abstract:
Each
month the Current Employment
Statistics (CES) program surveys
about 145,000 businesses and government agencies, representing
approximately 557,000 individual worksites, in order to provide
detailed industry data on employment, hours, and earnings of
workers on nonfarm payrolls. The CES program produces nonfarm
employment series for all employees, production and nonsupervisory
employees, and women employees. Most employment series begin in
1990, although employment by aggregate industry sector and most
major industry sectors is published as far back as 1939.
This
outreach survey has multiple objectives. First, we would like to
learn more about our user audience, for example, who are they,
which CES data do they prefer to use, and how often do they visit
our website? Related objectives include the following:
Which
specific data products are used?
What
level of detail is preferred in our data products?
Which
publications are used, and preferred?
How
are CES data accessed, and how satisfied are data users with
access to the data, the usability of our website, and
documentation provided on the website?
Does
the current release schedule meet data users’ needs?
Which
analytical measures are most useful? Are there suggestions for
alternative measures?
Is
the process of revising CES data understood? Do data users
believe the revision process improves or degrades the data?
Which parts of the process are liked or disliked?
How
satisfied are data users with the analytical research summaries,
news releases, and articles provided by BLS?
Is
BLS customer service satisfactory?
What
data products would they like to see BLS produce?
We will
contact potential survey respondents by placing a link to the
survey on our website, and inviting visitors to give us feedback.
In addition, we will send the survey invitation to a list of 150
data users who have contacted BLS with questions about the CES
data.
We will
send potential respondents an email with the survey invitation.
We will follow-up email addresses that bounce and send the survey
invitation to corrected email addresses. We will allow four weeks
for the data collection (from survey invitation to the closing of
the survey).
All of our responses
will be collected via web (using SurveyMonkey). No pledge of
confidentiality will be given. Respondents will be told “This
survey is being administered by SurveyMonkey.com and resides on a
server outside of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) domain. The
BLS cannot guarantee the protection of survey responses and
advises against the inclusion of personally-identifiable
information.”
Based
on our testing, we assume that it will take respondents an average
of 15 minutes to complete the survey.
Based on
the experiences of similar surveys, we expect a 20 percent
response rate for the email invitation sent to CES data users that
have previously been in contact with us (30 responses). We also
have over 6,000 email subscribers to CES data who will be notified
when we update our homepage to add the survey link, but they will
not receive an individual survey invitation. We expect 4.5
percent of this group to participate in the survey (270
responses).
We are
using the results of this survey internally for planning
purposes. We are not employing statistical methods
because we don’t have a sample frame of all
CES data users and therefore, can’t extrapolate the results
to all CES data users.
A copy
of the survey and the email invitations are attached.
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