Cover Letter

DOE Office of Science

Pre-notification Letter

Dear Professor Name Here,
We would like to ask for a few minutes of your time to complete an online interview
regarding your Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored project (Award No: xxxxx).
You have been selected as part of a random sample of principal investigators to assist the
DOE in meeting its reporting obligations to Congress. Soon after the receipt of this
letter, you will receive an e-mail notification for your login ID and password.
The DOE Technical Manpower survey is a pilot study to determine whether online
surveys are a valid and practical means for providing Congress with accurate information
regarding DOE funding activities. We want to assure you that the information will not be
used in any way to evaluate your own project, but instead will be aggregated with other
respondents' data and used to evaluate the activity of the DOE itself. Therefore, we have
retained an outside consulting firm (Summit Consulting LLC) to implement this survey.
Summit staff will remove your ID number before any analysis to ensure confidentiality.
This survey will ask questions about the number of graduate students and principal
investigators currently funded by a DOE sponsored project, and the number of hours per
week they are employed. This survey will also inquire about the number of students who
worked for you last year and completed their degree during that time period. For these
questions, you might need to consult with your grants administrator if you are unsure
about their answers.
Currently, the reported number of graduate students who received DOE funding is based
on estimates provided in award proposals. It is our intent to provide a more accurate
number of graduate students by their full- or part-time status based on actual participation
in DOE sponsored projects. We believe that by interviewing a small number of randomly
selected principal investigators (less than one-fifths of the awards), we will be able to
report accurate figures to Congress with small margins of error and, more importantly,
with minimal intrusion. For the majority of the selected principal investigators the DOE
Technical Manpower survey will take about 20 minutes to complete.
We acknowledge and apologize for the inconvenience of this request. With your
voluntary cooperation, we hope to establish that sampling methods can provide Congress
with the data it requires while making requests for information from individual
investigators relatively rare.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Christine Chalk at (202) 586-7203.
Sincerely,
Bill Valdez
Director of Planning and Analysis
Office of Science
Department of Energy

Prepared by Summit Consulting LLC

12/28/06