2013 Annual Survey of Public Pensions Pretesting Plan

The purpose of this letter is to provide an update for our January 2, 2013, request for OMB approval under the generic clearance for questionnaire pretesting research (OMB number 0607-0725), concerning conducting unstructured interviews for the 2013 Annual Survey of Public Pensions (ASPP). In that letter we requested and received approval to conduct 15 cognitive interviews with respondents from locally-administered pension systems in the state of Florida.

We have completed unstructured interviews with 13 locally-administered pension systems in the greater Miami, Florida area. Although this round of testing was quite successful, we found that we did not meet with enough governments to feel fully comfortable with our findings. Therefore, we would like to add an additional round of testing with 10-15 respondents in the greater Detroit, MI in April.

All other aspects of the research will remain the same as presented in the January 2 letter. For your ease of reference, enclosed (Attachments 1, 2, and 3) are a draft version of the protocol and the F-11 and F-12(S) forms.

We estimate that, in most cases, it will be necessary to interview only one respondent at each government agency. We estimate the length of the interview will be 1 hour. Thus, the maximum estimated additional burden for these additional interview is 15 hours.

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

Heidi M. Butler

Response Improvement Research Staff

U.S. Census Bureau

Washington, D.C. 20233

(301) 763-3322

Heidi.Butler@census.gov