Justification for No Material Change

REQUEST FOR CHANGE

AGENCY: HHS-CDC	OMB CONTROL NUMBER: 0920-0761
EXPIRATION DATE: 01/31/2011	ICR REFERENCE NUMBER: 200708-0920-001
TITLE: Randomized Controlled Trial for Routine Screening for Intimate Partner Violence

Summary of project: This is randomized controlled trial with three arms to establish the impact of screening and referral to services for women disclosing exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV). In the first arm, participants will be screened, and if disclosing IPV, will receive information on available resources in the community. In arms two and three, participants will not be screened, but one group will receive information on available resources in the community and the other will not. All three groups will be assessed for disability, quality of life, and utilization of health care and IPV services at baseline and at a 12 month follow-up.

Change proposed: Increase payment to respondent from $10 to $20 for the baseline assessment.

Justification: Based on the pilot study, participants, on average, contribute between 14 and 16 minutes of their time at the clinic (depending on whether they screen negatively or positively for exposure to intimate partner violence) for the baseline assessment. The questions we are asking are relatively sensitive as they deal with physical health, quality of life, disability, and, depending on the arm of the study, exposure to intimate partner violence. In addition, they contribute about one minute of their time to determine their eligibility for the study and about 10 minutes of their time reviewing the informed consent document.

In the pilot study, participants were paid $20 for their participation at the time of enrollment for both the baseline and follow-up assessments. With this payment, we were able to obtain an 82% participation rate. This amount is considered a fair amount for study visits of this type by the Cook County Bureau of Health Services Institutional Review Board (personal communication with IRB member December 1, 2008).

Given the sensitive nature of the questions, the time involved, and the norm in this community, we request permission to increase compensation of participants from $10 to $20 at time of enrollment in the Main Study. This amount has been used in previous studies conducted at this site with acceptable response rates. Incentives in this amount have been shown to improve response rates among those of low socioeconomic status.¹

1 Berlin, M, Mohadger, L, Waksberg, J, Kolstad, A, Kirsch, I, Rock, D, & Yamamoto, K. An Experiment in Monetary Incentives. Proceedings of the Survey Research Methods Section, American Statistical Association, 1992:393-398 retrieved March 5, 2007 from http://www.amstat.org/sections/srms/Proceedings/