MEMORANDUM
Date: April 28, 2014
To: Shelly Wilkie Martinez, Desk Officer
Office of Management and Budget
From: John Gawalt, Director
National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics
Via: Suzanne Plimpton, Clearance Officer
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Subject: Notification of data collection under generic clearance
The purpose of this memorandum is to inform you of NSF’s plan to conduct interviews under the generic clearance for survey improvement projects (OMB #3145-0174). This activity is associated with the NSF Nonprofit Research and Development Survey.
The Nonprofit Research and Development Survey (NPRD) was last conducted for Fiscal Years 1996 and 1997, and collected information on the amount of R&D funding and expenditures at non-academic nonprofit organizations. NSF has entered into a contract to again collect data from this sector, but with an initial focus on R&D performance versus funding. Due to the length of time since the last survey was conducted, NSF plans a complete redesign of the questionnaire. This questionnaire will draw from our current definitions and examples of what should be included as R&D though they may require adaptation to the unique terminology used by the nonprofit sector. NSF plans to have a pilot test of a new survey questionnaire in the summer of 2015. Prior to that effort, OMB information collection clearance will be sought separately.
In order to inform the development of the new questionnaire, NSF plans to conduct 20 in-person interviews with representatives at large, medium, and small nonprofit organizations across the country. The interviews will be exploratory and focused on understanding how nonprofit organizations define R&D, what types of R&D activities they are involved in, and if and how they keep records on their R&D activities.
The protocol for the interviews is provided in Appendix A.
We will schedule two-hour in-person interviews at each organization selected. NSF will select organizations specializing in medical, physical sciences, and engineering R&D as well as those who conduct social science or humanities-based studies in order to obtain a range of views on their definitions of R&D and record-keeping practices. We plan to recruit participants from the metropolitan areas of Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and San Antonio/Austin.
Interviews: We expect to conduct 20 two-hour interviews. NSF expects up to 3 people may attend each meeting on behalf of the organization. Therefore, we estimate a total of 120 hours of respondent burden.
There are no incentive payments.
The contact person for questions regarding this data collection is:
Ronda Britt
Project Manager
Nonprofit Research and Development Survey
National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics
National Science Foundation
703-292-7765
Attachments
cc: Rebecca Morrison
| File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| File Title | MEMORANDUM |
| Author | LCHRISTO |
| File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
| File Created | 2021-01-29 |