Memo - Description of Changes Since Last Approval

To: Steph Tatham

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)

Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

From: Carli Wulff and Tiffany McCormack

Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE)

Administration for Children and Families (ACF)

Date: July 27, 2018

Subject: Request for Additional Burden Hours for Previously Approved Generic Information Collection - Building Evidence on Employment Strategies for Low-Income Families Project (BEES)

We are submitting materials to request additional burden hours for the generic information collection, Building Evidence on Employment Strategies for Low-Income Families Project (BEES) project, that was approved on January 19, 2018 (under OMB #0970-0356). The approved data collection includes contacting researchers, policy experts, state and local administrators, and program staff for the purpose of gathering information about innovative programs designed to boost employment among low-income Americans. In our original submission, we requested only 100 hours of burden, based on the remaining burden under ACF’s umbrella formative generic (0970-0356). Now that ACF’s formative generic has been renewed, we are requesting additional burden to complete the work.

The BEES evaluation team has begun the formative work and has interviewed several informants. The team has begun to identify some potentially promising programs — and has used most of the approved burden hours — but much outreach remains. The team continues to identify new respondents and is being approached by others as the field learns about the study. While the average burden hours per respondent has not changed, the additional burden hours will allow the study to conduct conversations with an additional number of respondents. As Supporting Statement A describes, the scope of BEES is broad; thus, the formative, information-gathering work must reach a broad number and type of respondent. Furthermore, as described in the original submission, the project may include up to 21 rigorous evaluations and additional requests for generic information collections to inform potential additional evaluations would be submitted. This request expands the scope to include information gathering for 4 additional evaluations.

The primary update to this information collection is to increase the number of respondents, due to the changes described, but there are also minor edits to previously approved instruments and outreach materials. We have provided revised previously-approved materials with this request.

• Supporting Statement Part A and Supporting Statement Part B have been slightly revised to reflect that the request now covers the expanded scope of the project to describe the new burden.

• The discussion guides and email model are largely the same as in the original submission. We updated the IC expiration date and revised the materials to reflect some specific terminology the project is now using (substance/opioid use disorder). We added one new question in the discussion guide for program staff, designed to help us better understand a local program’s community context, and a few additional probes under already existing questions in that guide.