SSA Prog Supp GenIC - FEM T/TA Feedback

Family Economic Mobility (FEM) Training and Technical Assistance Feedback

Formative Data Collections for Program Support

0970 – 0531

Supporting Statement

Part A - Justification

June 2022

Submitted By:

Office of Head Start

Administration for Children and Families

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

A1. Necessity for the Data Collection

The Office of Head Start (OHS) has identified Family Economic Mobility (FEM) as a priority area for Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) on parent, family, and community engagement. FEM TTA offered by the National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE) in partnership with LIFT on behalf of OHS, is designed to assist Head Start programs with mobilizing opportunities for financial capability, families' employment, education, and exploration of career pathways. FEM is a critical area of focus due to the economic challenges Head Start families face due to systemic inequities that have been exacerbated by COVID-19, coupled with recent policies targeted to addressing socioeconomic disparities.

The proposed information collections will obtain feedback from participants in a 6-month long tailored TTA offering on FEM, entitled the “FEM Academy”, about their experience, familiarity, understanding, and confidence with implementing FEM strategies, as well as their confidence with implementing FEM strategies prior to, during, and after attending the FEM Academy. The data collection will play a critical role in informing the design, development, implementation, and facilitation of future FEM TTA, offered by the OHS TTA System.

Background

TTA program services were developed to support local Head Start grant recipients in providing high-quality, comprehensive services to families and children.¹ NCPFCE provides TTA on behalf of OHS in the following five identified priority areas for 2020-2025: (1) Systemic Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (PFCE), (2) Family Services Workforce, (3) Virtual Family Engagement and Family Services, (4) Family Economic Mobility (FEM), and (5) Eligibility, Recruitment, Selection, Enrollment, and Attendance (ERSEA).

OHS seeks to better understand and continuously improve the content and delivery of TTA on all five priority areas including FEM. Head Start Region I expressed interest in participating, designing, and implementing FEM TTA with grant recipients in their region. The FEM Academy and its learning objectives were designed in collaboration with this region to build on existing NCPFCE FEM TTA offerings. The FEM Academy will be offered by NCPFCE and consortium partner LIFT over a 6-month period, in collaboration with regional staff, to approximately 50 Head Start program staff from Region I. It will include an initial in-person event and a minimum of 5 virtual coaching sessions and will culminate in a closing in-person event.

The FEM Academy will be focused on supporting program staff’s knowledge of FEM topics and tools and their confidence in and implementation of FEM strategies in their work with families and community partners. The FEM Academy also seeks to better understand program staff feedback related to behavior, perception, and practice on FEM topics, as well as develop strategies that build and strengthen community partnerships to support family FEM goals.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) is a consortium partner of NCPFCE and will support the information collection activities.

Legal or Administrative Requirements that Necessitate the Collection

There are no legal or administrative requirements that necessitate the collection. ACF is undertaking the collection at the discretion of the agency.

A2. Purpose of Survey and Data Collection Procedures

Overview of Purpose and Approach

The main purpose of this information collection is to gain a better understanding of the delivery of and participants’ experiences with FEM TTA, as well as participants’ confidence with implementing FEM strategies prior to, during, and after attending the FEM Academy. This data collection will obtain feedback from FEM Academy participants on their familiarity and understanding of FEM, and confidence with implementing FEM strategies prior to, during, and after attending the FEM Academy. Data will be collected at events over the six-month period and will include assessments at multiple points in time including at the beginning, during, and at the end of the FEM Academy. Information collected will be used to inform the design, development, implementation, and facilitation of future FEM-related TTA.

This proposed information collection meets the following goals of ACF’s generic clearance for formative data collections for program support (0970-0531):

• Delivery of targeted assistance related to program implementation or the development or refinement of program and grantee processes

• Planning for provision of programmatic TTA.

Guiding Questions for FEM Data Collection

1. How can OHS better understand participants’ familiarity with FEM topics and their confidence with implementing FEM strategies prior to, during, and after attending the FEM Academy?

2. To what extent did program staff build their understanding of FEM topics and their confidence and capacity to engage in FEM-related conversations and activities from before to after the FEM Academy?

3. How are participants/grant recipient teams systematically implementing FEM conversations and activities (systematic sustainable approach)?

4. What strategies are participants using to develop and enhance community partnerships to support FEM?

Design

The design for this information collection is a mixed methods data collection design to better understand participants’ feedback on and experiences with the FEM Academy specifically in relation to their FEM knowledge, confidence, and practices during and after participating in FEM Academy. Quantitative data will be collected through surveys. Qualitative methods and measures will include structured and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, case studies and open-ended questions on surveys (see below for more detail). For more information about data collection procedures, see attached Supporting Statement Part B – Statistical Methods.

Universe of Data Collection Efforts

The FEM Data Collection will consist of the following three feedback forms:

1. Pre-FEM Academy Participation Feedback Form

2. Post-FEM Academy Participation Feedback Form

3. Short-Term Outcome Interview Form

Data Collection Activity	Respondent, Content, Purpose of Collection	Mode and Average Duration + Frequency
Pre-FEM Academy Participant Feedback	Respondents: 50 Content/Purpose: feedback questions to understand current level of FEM knowledge and concepts	Mode: Electronic Duration: 10 min Frequency: Once
Post-FEM Academy Participation Feedback	Respondents: 50 Content/Purpose: feedback questions to understand knowledge gains of FEM concepts following participation during the FEM Academy	Mode: Electronic Duration: 20 min Frequency: Three times
Short-Term Outcome Interview Form	Respondents: 50 Content/knowledge: Expanded feedback questions on more robust concepts of FEM contents learned	Mode: Virtual Discussion Duration: 40 min Frequency: Six times

Planned Uses of Existing Data

In May 2021, NCPFCE held a virtual two-day National FEM Institute for HS/EHS program staff. Other NCPFCE FEM offerings have included a National FEM webinar and a series of five live virtual Chatathons with FEM experts, that took place between July 2021 and January 2022. Knowledge learned from these events will be used in conjunction with the information from this collection to produce an internal summary report of participant feedback for Region 1. The knowledge will also serve as a resource for the FEM Academy content development process.

A3. Improved Information Technology to Reduce Burden

Region I respondents will receive a link to complete pre and post feedback surveys via Qualtrics. For the short-term outcome interview questions, outlook meeting invites will be sent to respondents and will be conducted using Zoom. With respondent permission, sessions will be recorded. This will minimize the need for respondents to repeat information. Recordings will be deleted once no longer needed for this purpose.

A4. Efforts to Identify Duplication

This data collection will not duplicate any other work being done by ACF or others as this is the first and only data collection of the delivery of the FEM Academy.

A5. Involvement of Small Organizations

Not applicable. No impact to small organizations expected.

A6. Consequences of Less Frequent Data Collection

Not applicable. This is a one-time data collection effort.

A7. Special Circumstances

There are no special circumstances for the proposed data collection efforts.

A8. Federal Register Notice and Consultation

In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (Pub. L. 104-13) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regulations at 5 CFR Part 1320 (60 FR 44978, August 29, 1995), ACF published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the agency’s intention to request an OMB review of the overarching generic clearance for formative information collection. This notice was published on November 3, 2020, (85 FR 69627), and provided a sixty-day period for public comment. During the notice and comment period, no substantive comments were received. A subsequent notice was published on December 28, 2020 (85 FR 84343) and provided a thirty-day period for public comment. During the notice and comment period, no substantive comments were received.

On January 28, 2022, ACF a notice (87 FR 4603) providing a sixty-day period related to an extension request to this umbrella clearance. No comments were received. ACF will submit a request to extend approval and publish an additional notice allowing a thirty-day period for public comment prior to July 31, 2022.

Consultation with Experts Outside of the Study

Not applicable as this is not a research study.

A9. Incentives for Respondents

No incentives for respondents are proposed for this information collection.

A10. Privacy of Respondents

Data collection will include demographic information, including program setting, role, years of experience, and race/ethnicity. This information is important to better understand whether TTA is useful, meaningful, culturally responsive, and respectful for everyone. We will use this information to help improve future TTA to be sure it is more responsive to diverse groups of people.

Information collected will be kept private to the extent permitted by law. Participants in the listening session will be informed of all planned uses of data, that their participation is voluntary, and that their information will be kept private to the extent permitted by law. They will also be informed in advance that focus groups and coaching session will be recorded, that no one other than staff will have access to the recordings. Recordings will be deleted once no longer needed for the clarification of responses provided. Furthermore, introductory comments during each listening session will request that participants maintain privacy of all participants by not discussing the reflections shared with anyone who did not participate in the same focus group or coaching session.

Information will not be maintained in a paper or electronic system from which data are actually or directly retrieved by an individuals’ personal identifier.

A11. Sensitive Questions

There are no sensitive questions in this data collection.

A12. Estimation of Information Collection Burden

Total Burden Requested Under this Information Collection

Instrument	Total Number of Respondents	Number of Responses Per Respondent	Average Burden Hours Per Response		Annual Burden Hours	Average Hourly Wage	Total Annual Cost
Pre-FEM Academy Participation Feedback	50	1	.17		8.5	$51.74	$439.79
Post-FEM Academy Participation Feedback	50	3	.33		16.5	$51.74	$853.71
Short-Term Outcome Interview Form	50	6	.67		33.5	$51.74	$1,733.29
Total Burden and Costs				58.5			$3,026.79

The total burden request calculation takes the total number of participants attending the Region 1 FEM Academy TTA sessions who will provide feedback and determines the number of responses and the amount of time each respondent will take to complete each instrument.

The total number of respondents for all instruments are projected to be 50 as 50 participants will attend the FEM Academy. The Pre-Participation Feedback contains 13 questions and is estimated to take an average of 10 minutes per response. The Post-FEM Academy Participation Feedback Form will be distributed three times throughout the FEM Academy and is estimated to take an average of 20 minutes to complete per response.

The Short-Term Outcome Interview Form will be used at virtual coaching sessions and will be administered up to six times per respondent. This instrument contains general feedback questions, and three sections for specific feedback on three components of the FEM Academy (i.e., FEM Toolkit, Program-to-Program, and Community Partnerships Components). Certain items will be skipped depending on the content of the virtual coaching session since virtual coaching sessions are individualized based on the needs of the participants. For example, feedback questions on the FEM Toolkit component would not be included if participants are not aware of this component following the virtual coaching session. We expect feedback from the interview form would take an average of 40 minutes per respondent for each time it is administered.

Total Annual Cost

The cost to respondents shown above was calculated using the relevant Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) job codes and wage data as follows:

• For site administrators, 11-9031 Education Administrators, Preschool and Childcare Center/Program from May of 2021 at $25.87 which is multiplied by 2 to account for fringe and benefits for an hourly wage of $51.74

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes119031.htm

A13. Cost Burden to Respondents or Record Keepers

There are no additional costs to respondents.

A14. Estimate of Cost to the Federal Government

The total cost for the data collection activities under this current request will be $17,094. Federal staff costs are estimated to be about 480 hours of the time of a staff at the GS-11 Step 10 labor category to oversee the activities of this data collection.

A15. Change in Burden

This is a new information collection request under the umbrella formative generic clearance for program support (0970-0531).

A16. Plan and Time Schedule for Information Collection, Tabulation and Publication

The data is only intended for internal capacity building on the delivery of TTA and no publications are expected as a result of this data collection. Data collection will begin upon OMB approval and continue throughout the 6-month long FEM Academy. The post-feedback form will be administered once between 6 months to 1 year following the end of the FEM Academy.

A17. Reasons Not to Display OMB Expiration Date

All instruments will display the expiration date for OMB approval.

A18. Exceptions to Certification for Paperwork Reduction Act Submissions

No exceptions are necessary for this information collection.

1 https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/policy/head-start-act/sec-648-technical-assistance-training