Testing Plan

In our June 8, 2007 letter to you, the Census Bureau informed you of our plans to conduct additional research under the generic clearance for questionnaire pretesting research (OMB number 0607-0725). This research included plans to conduct in-depth interviews with business respondents to support the development of a redesigned Survey of Industrial Research & Development (SIRD), an annual survey co-sponsored by the Census Bureau and the National Science Foundation. The main goal of our testing is to get respondent feedback on issues related to the redesigned SIRD questionnaire.

The current submission provides an update to that letter. We have completed 2 of the scheduled 5 rounds of cognitive testing (with 15-20 respondents each round), each lasting 3 months (2 months in the field, plus a month for summarizing, debriefing and planning the next round). A sixth round is scheduled as a debriefing round following the pilot, planned for early 2009. Although our first two rounds have been quite successful, we are finding that we may not be meeting with quite enough companies to feel fully comfortable with our findings. Therefore, we would like to request additional burden hours for the remaining four rounds. We would like to add approximately 10-15 additional respondents per round.

We are enclosing the module currently being tested in round 3, containing questions about the nature of the R&D work, to be directed to the R&D manager), as well as the module we tested in round 2 containing questions about employees that do the R&D work, that will be directed to HR), because we realized we never forwarded these to you as we had promised. Our apologies.

All other aspects of the research remain as presented in the June 8 letter.

We still estimate that each interview will take approximately 2 hours. Thus the total additional burden for the additional companies is 120 hours (4 rounds X 2 hours X 15 respondents per round )

The contact person for questions regarding data collection and statistical aspects of the design of this research is:

Kristin Stettler

Establishment Survey Methods Staff

OSMREP, Room 7K132A

U.S. Census Bureau

Washington, D.C. 20233

(301) 763-7596

[email protected]