Supporting Statement

OMB Control #0693-0033
Expiration Date: 9/30/2025
NIST Generic Clearance for Program Evaluation Data Collections
NIST SRM1950 Customer Feedback Survey
FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS
1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.
A survey was developed for existing and prospective customers of SRM1950 Metabolites in
Frozen Human Plasma, which is provided by the Chemical Sciences Division (CSD) of the
Material Measurements Laboratory (MML) at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST).
SRM1950 was the first reference material developed specifically for metabolomics research.
This SRM represents ‘normal’ human plasma and was obtained from 100 individuals. This SRM
was designed to apply broadly to the field, not toward specific applications. It is intended
primarily for validation of methods for determining metabolites such as fatty acids, electrolytes,
vitamins, hormones, and amino acids in human plasma and similar materials. This SRM can also
be used for comparison of measurement technologies used in metabolomic studies and for
quality assurance when assigning values to in-house reference materials. SRM1950 was first
made available in 2011 and sells an average of 285 units/year, which is within the top 15 SRMs
for sales in FY21. While the average units sold per year for SRM1950 is known, this information
is not sufficient to determine when, what, and to what extent the SRM updates should take place.
SRM1950 is value assigned for ninety components, mainly based on NIST Reference
Measurement Procedure measurements and other higher-order method measurements at NIST.
Given the large number of assigned values, it is not known which values are utilized by
customers. In addition, multiple publications by NIST authors and others outside of NIST have
demonstrated that SRM1950 has been used by metabolomic/lipidomic communities as a
common research material independent of its assigned values.
With an approximate 4-year supply of SRM1950 remaining, this project aims to engage the user
community through an online customer and stakeholder survey to determine whether a renewal
material with many certified values similar to SRM1950 is required by customers or if current or
new materials more similar to recently introduced metabolomics RMs would fulfill customer
needs for a common harmonization material. Organized customer feedback is necessary to
ascertain which of these values are most useful to customers and also what types of additional
materials or values are needed. The survey will target existing SRM1950 users, as well as
prospective users from professional metabolomic/lipidomic associations such as Metabolomics
Quality Assurance and Quality Control Consortium (mQACC), the Metabolomics Society, and
the Metabolomics Association of North America. This information will allow CSD to focus
future renewal and production efforts more appropriately.

The survey has two intentions: 1) to identify assigned values that are of most importance to
customers of SRM1950; and 2) to monitor and support the emerging measurement needs of the
metabolomic/lipidomic communities with the goal of expanding the potential research areas and
hence impact of the SRM program.
2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties,
pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.
The survey was developed by a user-centered researcher in the Visualization and Usability
Group (VUG) of the Information Access Division (IAD) in the Information Technology
Laboratory (ITL) at NIST. VUG has in-depth expertise in contextual interviews, survey and
survey development and deployment, experimental design, and usability evaluation. VUG has
developed and fielded stakeholder surveys in many domains including Public Safety
Communications, Forensics, and Cybersecurity and Privacy. Therefore, the VUG researcher is
well qualified to construct a survey to meet the intentions described in Question #1.
The survey has gone through rigorous review process including CSD staff members with indepth knowledge and expertise in SRM1950, a survey expert, and a statistics expert to ensure the
language and questions were accurate and appropriate. Cognitive walkthroughs and pilot testing
were also conducted with individuals who are representative of the target population in
metabolomic/lipidomic communities to receive feedback on the survey’s timing, usability, and
question comprehension. All review feedback was incorporated into the final instrument.
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.
An email requesting feedback via the survey (see attached email invitation) will be sent to
customers who have purchased SRM1950 (for a total of approximately 460 and to prospective
users from professional metabolomic/lipidomic associations such as Metabolomics Quality
Assurance and Quality Control Consortium (mQACC), the Metabolomics Society, and the
Metabolomics Association of North America (for an estimated total of 1000). A reminder email
(see attached email reminder) will be sent two weeks after the first invitation email to improve
the response rate.
If email recipients choose to respond, they will follow the survey link in the email to the survey
instructions and survey (see attached Collection Instrument and Information sheet). The first
survey question asks about respondents’ status and branches them to appropriate survey versions,
regarding whether they are: (A) existing SRM1950 users (including current and past users) (see
attached Collection Instrument, version A); or (B) prospective users who might be interested in
purchasing SRM1950 in the future (see attached Collection Instrument, version B); or (C) not
current users, nor interested in purchasing SRM1950 in the future (see attached Collection
Instrument, version C); or (D) resellers/distributors of SRM1950 (see attached Collection
Instrument, version D).

The survey will take about 10 minutes to complete.
We anticipate a 30 % response rate to the survey to have about 440 respondents completing the
survey.
The expected burden hours are thus calculated: 440 respondents with 10 minutes per response
add up to about 73 burden hours.
4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results
to the entire customer population.
The survey will be conducted through a commercially available web interface (e.g.,
Qualtrics.com), and the responses will be collected into a database. The project team will have
access to the database containing the responses. The researchers will conduct descriptive
statistics on the quantitative data. Since the collection instrument also contains some open-ended
questions, a wide-range of responses may be received that will not be easily generalized to the
participant population. In addition, the results from the survey are intended to guide future SRM
development activities, and therefore will not be formally reported. The project team will review
the individual responses to assess:
1) the approximate percentage of respondents indicating that current assigned values of
SRM1950 are/are not of value to their work. If, for example, the majority of SRM1950
customers indicate that the value for Valine is not of importance to their work, we may
consider Valine to be unnecessary on future SRM1950 renewal.
2) if there are any predominant trends in the responses to the open-ended questions.