Respondent Messaging

The Census Bureau plans to conduct new research under the Generic Clearance for Internet Nonprobability Panel Pretesting (OMB number 0607-0978). The Census Bureau is working on the conveyance of required information to respondents in a way that is clear and easy to understand. This research seeks to explore various ways of communicating the required description of access to data collected by Title 13, as well as various other language required by the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA). This research is two-staged, starting with a rather large qualitative data collection exploring many possible options for this language, followed by a smaller-scale cognitive test of those options that seem most viable and reliable based on findings from the larger study.

Attachment A shows the various ways that we can describe 1) Who has access to data collected under Title 13 and 2) Aspects of the PRA, including that a census or survey is mandatory, confidentiality protection, public burden and display of the OMB control number.

This is a general qualitative study conducted in partnership with the Policy Office that will inform language used by the Census Bureau for many different data collections.

Part 1: Online Data Collection

Staff from the Center for Survey Measurement (CSM) will sample 4000 emails from our opt-in panel. We expect to achieve a 10% response rate, in accordance with recent studies, with a maximum of 400 completes for this study. This will allow approximately 100 responses per message. CSM staff will send the emails through GovDelivery. CSM will host the survey through Survey Monkey and will collect no personally identifiable data.

Respondents will be shown 9 messages from Attachment A (as outlined in Attachment A) and after each statement, respondents will be asked “In your own words, what is this message telling you?” After responding to each of these, respondents will be asked if they have any further comments about things they liked or didn’t like about the messages they saw. Then, they will be asked some very general demographics, shown also in Attachment A.

For this study, each email address in the sample will receive a maximum of three notification emails:

• initial email on a Monday,

• reminder email on the following Thursday (if they have not yet clicked on the link to the survey), and

• final reminder email on the following Monday with the survey closing the following Friday.

Copies of these emails are included in Attachment 2.

We estimate that potential respondents will spend approximately 5 minutes reading emails (if every person sampled reads the emails, it will be 5 minutes times 4,000 emails, totaling 333 hours) and each respondent will spend approximately 10 minutes on average completing the survey (10 minutes times 400 respondents totals 67 hours). Thus, the total estimated respondent burden for 400 completes for this study is approximately 400 hours.

Part 2: Cognitive Test

After analyzing data from Part 1, CSM and Policy staff will select the messages that are best understood by respondents to place into cognitive testing. CSM staff will recruit up to 30 respondents varying demographics such as age, race, gender, education for cognitive interviews. Respondents will be probed on how messages fit together and overall understanding of the messaging.

We estimate that each interview will take about one hour, totaling 30 hours for this part of the study. Burden for cognitive interview recruiting is covered under our generic clearance for general recruiting.

In total, this collection has estimated respondent burden of 430 hours.

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

Jennifer Childs

Center for Survey Measurement

U.S. Census Bureau

Washington, D.C. 20233

(304) 728-4932

Jennifer.hunter.childs@census.gov