Survey of Business Owners Pretesting Plan

This is an update to a request to conduct pretesting on the 2012 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) that was submitted under the generic clearance for questionnaire pretesting research (OMB number 0607-0725) on October 12, 2011 and approved on October 19, 2011, and a request for additional burden hours.

Our original request was for a total of 75 interviews and 84 burden hours. After conducting the first round of interviews, we made significant revisions to the questionnaire, requiring additional interviews to evaluate the changes. The revised questionnaire and the cognitive interview protocol are attached.

We have conducted 56 interviews to date, and have 19 interviews remaining from our original request. Round three may require up to 42 cases, depending on the extent of the changes made to the forms after round two. Therefore, we are requesting approval to conduct an additional 23 interviews.

The third round of testing will be conducted in four cities in April and May 2012, including Miami, FL and the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. The other two locations have yet to be determined. We may also conduct more local interviews in place of making one trip, in order to save the cost of travel.

Subject area specialists from the Census Bureau will accompany the researcher on most, if not all, of the interviews in round two. They will assist with respondent debriefing, especially in cases where additional clarification of the subject matter is required or proficiency in Spanish is needed.

We will record the interviews with the participants’ permission in order to aid researchers in accurately reporting findings and recommendations. Before beginning the interviews, we will inform participants that their response is voluntary. We also will inform the participants that the information they provide is confidential. We will not be providing monetary incentives to participants in this study.

We estimate that it will be necessary to interview only one participant from each business. We estimate the length of the interviews will average 60 minutes. (Please note that the original estimate of 75 minutes per case has been revised downward since the first submission, because it was not feasible to send forms to respondents for them to complete in advance as originally planned.) Thus, the maximum estimated burden for this submission is 23 hours.

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

Alfred D. Tuttle

Response Improvement Research Staff

Office of Economic Planning and Improvement

U.S. Census Bureau
Washington, D.C. 20233
301-763-7809

[email protected]