Appendix B - Formative Usage Report

REPORT: use of Formative generic Clearance

(0970-0356) From 2008-2011

January 2012

Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation

Administration for Children and Families

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

7^th Floor, West Aerospace Building

370 L’Enfant Promenade, SW

Washington, D.C. 20447

In October 2008, OMB approved ACF’s request for a generic information collection to conduct a variety of formative data collections (0970-0356). This report describes the use of the generic IC during the first three years, including the number of hours used, as well as the nature and results of the activities completed under this generic clearance.

The original generic IC was approved for three years, during which time ACF requested four generic ICs. After an approved increase in burden during the second year of approval, the total burden approved for the generic IC was 600 annual burden hours.

During the first year of use, two projects used the generic IC to inform development, using a total of 101 burden hours. During the second year, one project used 72 hours of burden to collection information using a discussion guide. In the third year, a final generic IC was approved, using 61 hours of burden. Over the three years, information was collected from 214 respondents requiring 360 hours of burden.

Date	Project	Respondents	Burden Hours
5/5/2009	FACES 2009	60	165
6/12/2009	Child Care Quality Rating System Assessment	41	62
Total Year 1		101	227
12/8/2009	TANF Research Synthesis – TANF and CCDF Discussion Guide	72	72
Total Year 2		72	72
6/20/2011	Family Provider Relationships in Early Care and Education	41	61
Total Year 3		41	61
Total over 3 Years		214	360

The use of the formative generic IC has provided valuable information for the development of our projects. Information about some specific activities completed under this generic clearance is provided below. Under the terms of clearance for this generic IC, all of the methods and the data approved in the following ICs were limited to informing OPRE and ACF’s internal decision-making, research planning, and contextualization of research findings. The information collected was used for internal purposes only and was not released to the public.

FACES 2009

In February 2009, ACF requested permission to contact the 60 Head Start programs that were selected to participate in The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey 2009 Cohort (FACES 2009) for the purpose of gathering information that would be used (1) to develop a sampling frame of Head Start centers in each program and (2) to facilitate the selection of the center, class, and child samples for FACES 2009. The generic clearance allowed us to begin contacting programs earlier in the sampling process, before the end of the prior school year, for data collection the following fall.

Child Care Quality Rating System Assessment

The purpose of this generic clearance IC was to gather data that were not publicly available to inform the subsequent work of the Child Care Quality Rating System Assessment (QRS) project. ACF requested permission to contact administrators from the 27 QRS identified for the project by email and telephone to administer a screener designed to collect information on QRS data, monitoring and evaluation. Information gathered was used for internal-decision making, for research planning, and to put research findings from all the activities of the project in context. Specifically, data collected from the screener directly informed (1) the selection of QRS sites for the in-depth case studies, (2) identification of evaluation data to conduct secondary data analyses, and 3) identification of gaps in resources to aid states in collecting data and conducting evaluations. The identification of gaps informed the development of a toolkit of practices for evaluating QRS.

Data collection approved through the generic clearance allowed OPRE/ACF to identify data available for secondary analyses that would not have been identified through other public sources, as well as the information necessary to select the best sites for an in-depth study of quality measurement in QRS systems. Reports from both of these activities provided the Agency and states implementing QRS with critical information to be used in planning, data collection and policy development, which would not have been available otherwise.

Family Provider Relationships in Early Care and Education

In June and July 2011, the Family-Provider Relationship Quality measure development project conducted focus groups under the formative generic IC.  The results of the focus groups have been invaluable in shaping the surveys that will capture the quality of the relationships between families and their early care and education providers/teachers.  As an example, through the focus groups, it was learned that the word “relationship” was not understood by parents, providers and researchers in the same ways, leading to the development of different, and more universally understood, terms for the idea of “relationship”, which will be used in the surveys.