NIST ITL Parent Password Survey Supporting Statement

OMB CONTROL NUMBER 0693-0043

NIST GENERIC CLEARANCE FOR USABILITY DATA COLLECTIONS

NIST, Information Technology Laboratory (ITL)

Parent Password Survey

Survey Questionnaires for: Questions to understand parent password practices and involvement in their children’s password usage

1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.

The purpose of this study is to examine parents’ password practices and their involvement (or lack of involvement) in their grade school children’s password usage. The ultimate goal is the development of useful guidance for parents/guardians to help their children understand best practices for passwords.

In conjunction with the Youth Password Survey (OMB approved on January 19, 2018), NIST ITL intends to recruit up to 500 parents/guardians of grade school children. Participants will be parents or guardians of students between Kindergarten (K) and 12^th grades. Participants will be recruited from the same school as the student participants – a minimum of three (up to nine) different school districts: at least one from mid-west and one from DC/MD/VA area.

2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested

parties, pretesting, and responses to suggestions for improvement.

The survey questions were developed and refined based on previous password research within NIST, and discussions with teachers, the National Initiative of Cybersecurity Education (NICE), content experts, and survey experts.

3. Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if

fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions

your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.

Each of the school districts will identify three schools (one for K to 5^th graders, one for 6^th to 8^th graders, and one for 9^th to 12^th graders). The schools will assist in disseminating information about this survey (including the survey) to student parents/guardians for participation. There will be between 30 and 60 parent/guardian participants per school for a maximum of 500 parents/guardians for the study.

The parents/guardians who are interested in participating will take the survey. The survey includes 17 questions, followed by 7 demographic questions. This process will take at most 20 minutes.

4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize

the results to the entire customer population.

NIST researchers will perform data analysis. Descriptive statistics will be run on demographic questions. Descriptive and inferential statistics will be run on the survey questions. The analysis will explore the ways in which the data fit with or contradict current research on password practices and behaviors. We intend to publish the results from this study in a research journal article. No generalization will be made beyond the study participants and their demographics.

There will be no collection, storage, access, use, or dissemination of personally identifiable information from the survey. As stated in the provided information sheet, participants will be assigned a participant reference code that will be associated with their responses.  Data will not be linked back to a respondent.  NIST will not create or keep a list that links the participant reference code to a participant.