F. NASS Comments and Westat Responses

Appendix F. NASS Comments

Food and Nutrition Service

Fourth Access, Participation, Eligibility, and Certification Study (APEC IV)

OMB Control Number 0584-0530

Review conducted by Jeffrey Hunt, Mathematical Statistician

NASS - Methodology Division

General Comment:

I’ve finished with the APEC docket. This docket took a while to review because of the large number of attached documents, however the comments are limited to only five of the documents because this was an extremely professional proposal. They’ve clearly got it down to a science. The comments are included in the attached zip file.

Beyond the comments I have left on the attached documents, I wanted to note that many files had not been ‘finalized’ in that they still contained redlined text and/or highlighting for edits. I did not single these instances out, because I presumed FNS knows about the redlining and highlighting.

Specific Comments on Part A:

Page	Comment scope	Comment text	Westat Response
36	The estimated annualized cost for the household survey respondent uses the Federal minimum wage of $7.25	Seems too low, even among people receiving free or reduced meals	Updated to $27.07 here and in the burden table.
36	cost is $ $420	Typo, double $	This was a typo and has been revised.
37	0.2505	Why not .25	Revised to .25
39	budget calibrate	Budget calibrate?	This was a typo and has been revised.

Specific Comments on Part B:

Page	Comment scope	Comment text	Westat Response
7	The overall response rate for APEC IV is expected to be at least 92 percent.	Point of clarification. Here your overall rate is 92 percent, and nowhere above is there a % less than 75% for what you’re expecting to see. In Part A, you write that you expect 9899 respondents out of 13,068. This is just over a 75% rate itself. Unless I am misunderstanding something, you are more optimistic in response rates in Part B than Part A	Part A is based on the burden table, which does not exactly mirror this sampling table. For example, the burden table includes the pretest respondents and States, which have high estimated response rates. In addition, the burden table is based on the estimated burden to the public, so while we are collecting CEP school student records (as shown here in this table), the actual burden is on the CEP SFAs (n=213), not on the student records.
7	14,519	Similar question here. I would have expected this number to be 13,068 based on Part A. What am I missing?	Same response as above.
7	Total 29,251,296 14,519 92% 13,392	I understand how you constructed all subtotals. I am not sure how you constructed this total line. What subtotals is it the sum of?	This total is the sum between the non-CEP students/HHs and the CEP student records. E.g., the sample total of 20,771 = 11,723 + 9,048. This total row was not entirely updated from an earlier version of the table.

Specific Comments on Appendices:

Document	Comment scope	Westat Response
B6. (Instrument E7) Household Survey Income Worksheet	Table on Type of Income or Benefits. Row 10 is blank.	Removed blank row.
C25. (Recruitment 025) Household Consent form_Virtual Survey	Extra blank page at end of document.	Removed blank page.
C26. (Recruitment 021) Household Survey Recruitment Guide-In person survey	Make “city” line longer in question 3.	Revision made.

Jeffrey Hunt

T: 202-720-5359

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