NCS Customer Survey Clearance

OMB Approval No. 1225-0059

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SURVEY AND CONFERENCE EVALUATION CLEARANCE FORM

A. SUPPLEMENTAL SUPPORTING STATEMENT

A.1. Title:	The National Compensation Survey (NCS) User Survey
A.2. Compliance with 5 CFR 1320.5: Yes ___X__ No _____		A.3. Assurances of confidentiality: The data will be held in confidence in accordance to the confidentiality pledge on the survey instrument.
A.4. Federal cost: $ 2, 330 (20 hours of BLS employee work)		A.5. Requested expiration date (Month/Year): 04/2009
A.6. Burden Hour estimates: a. Number of Respondents: 275 a.1. % Received Electronically 100% b. Frequency: One-time c. Average Response Time: 5 minutes d. Total Annual Burden Hours: 22.9 hours		A7. Does the collection of information employ statistical methods? ____X___ No Yes (Complete Section B and attach BLS review sheet).
A.8. Abstract: The National Compensation Survey (NCS), a product of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, captures nationwide data on employee benefits provisions, employee benefit costs, and employee earnings. The NCS Program will conduct extensive strategic planning in the Summer of 2008. The NCS Program is exploring ways that they could present new data tabulation products. In order to prioritize what new products should be offered to users, the program would like feedback from data users. Specifically, the program would like to know: Where do NCS users get data on employee benefits? If BLS is not the first place they go to for benefits data, why not? How do they use benefits data? Which of the products proposed would be most or least useful to users and why? What additional products highlighting benefits data would users like to see? Are there particular emerging benefits or practices users would like to see captured in the future? What is their opinion of the quality of BLS benefits data versus data available from other sources? Our sample will be taken from two lists: benefits conference attendees and people sending BLS benefits data requests. The list of benefits conference attendees are potential NCS users, meaning they may or may not have used NCS data. There are 300 in this group. The second group, people sending BLS benefits data requests, is known NCS users. There are 800 in this group. That means there will be 1,100 potential respondents in the sample frame. We will send potential respondents an advance email telling them about the survey, then a week later a survey invitation via email. We will follow-up on email addresses that bounce and send the survey invitation to corrected email addresses. We will also send follow-up emails to non-respondents or respondents with incomplete surveys. We will allow four weeks for the data collection (from survey invitation to the closing of the survey). This methodology will be used for the pilot and the actual data collections. (The pilot is so that we can test the survey items and survey methodology.) We will include 100 potential respondents in the pilot and the rest of the sample list, 1000, in the actual data collection. All of our responses will be collected via web (using Survey Monkey). We assumed that it would take the respondents an average of five minutes to complete the survey. We expect a 25 percent response rate, based on the results of the IPP user survey. They obtained a 25 percent response rate using the methodology described above. This means we should have 25 respondents in the pilot and 250 respondents to the actual data collection, for a total of 275 respondents. We are only using the results of this survey internally for planning purposes. We are not employing statistical methods because we don’t have a sample frame of all NCS data users and therefore, can’t extrapolate the results to all NCS data users. A copy of the survey is attached.

B. SURVEYS AND EVALUATIONS EMPLOYING STATISTICAL METHODS

B.1

Sample Frames:

Limitations of the Sample Frames:

Expected Response Rates:

B.2

Sample Size:

Sample Allocation:

Sample Selection:

Procedure for Sample Selection:

B.3

Methods to Reduce Non-Response:

Survey Distribution Procedures:

B.4

Test of Procedures:

B.5

Name	Agency/Company/Organization	Number Telephone
Kathy Downey	DOL/BLS/OSMR	202-691-7382
Stephanie Costo	DOL/BLS/OCWC	202-691-6227