MEMORANDUM
Date: February 2, 2016
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 Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey.
The Higher Education Research and Development Survey, formerly known as the Survey of R&D Expenditures at Universities and Colleges, has been conducted annually since 1972. The survey collects information on separately accounted for research and development expenditures. In preparation for the FY 2016 survey clearance package, NSF plans to test several changes to the questionnaire via two sets of cognitive interviews. The first set will test an expansion of question 2 (foreign sources of R&D) and new definitions and examples provided for question 6 (basic research, applied research, and experimental development). The second set of interviews will be conducted with a different group of respondents and will test our notification of the changes to the fields of R&D that are being made to comply with the new NCSES Taxonomy of Disciplines. The Taxonomy of Disciplines was finalized in the fall of 2015, and all NCSES surveys will be adopting the taxonomy in 2016 and 2017 so that our fields will be comparable across surveys.
The draft questionnaire, protocol, and recruitment script for the question 2 and 6 interviews are provided in Appendix A. The draft notification email, list of field changes, recruitment email, and protocol for the field changes interviews are provided in Appendix B.
We will schedule 15 minute telephone interviews with each respondent selected. NSF will select a mix of large, medium, and small institutions from all areas of the country to ensure representation from a variety of schools.
Interviews: We expect to conduct 30 interviews of 15 minutes each with designated survey respondents to test the survey question expansion and modified definitions and examples. We expect to conduct an additional 45 interviews of 15 minutes each with designated survey respondents to test the notification email. Therefore, we estimate a total of 19 hours of respondent burden.
There are no incentive payments.
The contact person for questions regarding this data collection is:
Ronda Britt
Project Manager
Higher Education R&D Survey
National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics
National Science Foundation
703-292-7765
Attachments
cc: Rebecca Morrison
APPENDIX A
MATERIALS FOR COGNITIVE TESTS OF SURVEY QUESTION 2 AND 6
APPENDIX B
MATERIALS FOR COGNITIVE TESTS OF FIELDS OF R&D CHANGES
| File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| File Title | MEMORANDUM |
| Author | LCHRISTO |
| File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
| File Created | 2021-01-29 |