Non-Substantive Change Request (July 2012 Rotational Questionnaire Sets)

The Census Bureau requests permission to make non-substantive changes to the questionnaire under the clearance for the Federal Statistical System Public Opinion Survey (OMB number 0607-0969). The objective of this research is to gather data on public understanding of and trust in Federal Statistical Agencies and federal statistics. These public opinion data will enable the Census Bureau to better understand public perceptions, which will provide guidance for communicating with the public and for future planning of data collection that reflects a good understanding of public perceptions and concerns.

As a reminder, from February 2012 through September 2013, the Census Bureau will add 25 questions nightly onto an ongoing data collection by the Gallup Daily Tracking Survey. Approximately nineteen of the 25 questions are core questions and approximately 6 are available for rotation. Core questions focus on awareness of and attitudes towards federal statistics and federal statistical agencies. The topic of this change request is the rotating questions. Up to 20 times during the data collection, up to 6 questions may be rotated in the survey. OMB and Census have agreed that these rotating questions constitute non-substantive changes to this submission. Attached to this letter is the request to make these changes through a single tracking document. This tracking document contains a complete history of all questions asked and the date that each question was or is planned to be asked.

Three planned rotating sets of questions will expand the Federal Statistical Systems Public Opinion Survey's ability to track the public's attitudes towards the use of administrative records by statistical agencies. Each of the sets focuses on a different combination of administrative data, data source, and data use or user. The first set asks respondents about their attitudes towards the use of medical history data from health care providers by the National Center for Health Statistics. The second set asks respondents to consider name and age data from the Social Security Administration, which will be used by the Census Bureau for the next decennial census. The third looks at purchase information obtained from supermarket loyalty cards for use in the BLS' Consumer Expenditure Survey. All three sets are structured the same way, with an initial question about the respondents' favorability towards that set's combination of administrative data, data source, and data use and then a series of four rotating framing questions. The respondent is asked his or her favorability about the administrative data use following each frame. A final, open-coded question is asked to determine why the respondent was or was not in favor of the administrative data use.

Given the variation between the three sets of administrative data types/providers/uses and the standardized structure of the questions, we hope to move beyond previous attitudinal work that asked “general” administrative record questions that do not reference specific types of data, and instead explore the public’s attitudes in more real-life context. During these 3 rotations, we will see if findings are generalizable across agencies and types of data.

You will see a one week data collection that preceded these three rotations, that was an effective pretest. After 1 week of data collection, Gallup requested that we modify the questions to reduce the respondent burden. The questions were revised for that series as well as the upcoming series based on their request.

The contact person for questions regarding data collection and study design is:

Jennifer Hunter Childs

Center for Survey Measurement

U.S. Census Bureau

Washington, D.C. 20233

(301) 763- 4927

jennifer.hunter.childs@census.gov