Justification

Change Request

NIOSH Gulf Oil Spill Initial Survey

0920-0851

Date: May 28, 2010

Requested Changes: 1) Implementation of a web-based version of the NIOSH Gulf Oil Spill Initial Survey data collection instrument. This version of the instrument will be used to collect data from government response workers and others who cannot be accessed using the paper-based instrument. There are no changes to the questions’ content, wording or order. The estimated burden per response for both the paper and web survey is 5 minutes.

2) Increase in the estimated number of respondents to the NIOSH Gulf Oil Spill Initial Survey. This is due to the addition of the web-based survey.

3) Current field experience indicates that the completion time for the survey is 5 minutes. Therefore, we would like to reduce the initial time estimates from 15 minutes to 5 minutes.

Impact on Burden: The burden table below reflects the increase in respondents and the decrease in burden hours. The total estimated burden to respondents will decrease from 1625 hours to 833 hours.

Type of Respondent	Form Name	No. of Respondents	No. Responses per Respondent	Average Burden per Response (in hours)	Total Burden Hours
Oil spill responders-web	Web-based survey	3,500	1	.0833	292
Oil spill responders- paper	Paper-based survey	6,500	1	.0833	541
		Total			833

Justification: Justification is that, particularly for the workers on the boats, it will be hard to access them with paper forms; however, they all have good access to the Internet.  Also, several government agencies have mentioned that it would be easier to notify all of their employees to complete the survey through email and then direct them to the web survey. We believe the representativeness of the survey will be altered if these various groups are inhibited from participating because of the paper form.  The change will involve creating a web-based survey that mirrors the paper version.  No alterations to the questions are planned.  With the addition of these additional groups through the web survey, we need to increase the number of responders to 10,000 (6,500 paper-based and 3,500 web-based). Current field experience with the survey indicates that a better estimate of time to complete the survey is 5 minutes.