Justification for Change

Circumstances of Change Request for OMB 0920-0941

This is a nonmaterial/non-substantive change request for #0920-0941, which received approval through May 2016 for the multi-site evaluation of Dating Matters. The current request aims to amend the student follow-up survey with questions that will be relevant to participating youth as they matriculate into high school.

In the 2013-2014 school year, the first cohort of youth who will be followed as part of the Dating Matters evaluation will matriculate into high school. The Student Outcome Survey-Follow-Up (Attachment E) will be used with these youth, although some minor changes to questions are necessary given their development phase. Therefore, we are requesting to add questions about the youth’s experience as an i2i Brand Ambassador (a role they can only have as high school students), and add additional questions about dating violence, emotional support, substance use, and sexual behaviors. An itemized list of proposed changes is included below:

Attachment

Reason for Modification

Student Outcome Survey Follow-up (Attachment E)

Response options expanded to be developmentally appropriate for high school youth: items 3, 6, 34. We have approval to evaluate the program for impacts on dating violence and associated risk factors (as mediators or moderators of program effects). Thus, we have added a small number of items that are developmentally appropriate for high school youth. These items have been drawn from large school-based surveys, such as the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System: Alcohol use (items 60-61; example item: During the last 30 days, on how many days did you have at least one drink of alcohol? Sexual activity and identity (items 62-65; example item: People are different in their sexual attraction to other people. Which best describes your feelings? Are you…) Teen dating violence victimization and perpetration (items 66-72; example item: During the past 12 months, how many times did someone you were dating or going out with physically hurt you on purpose?) Emotional support (items 73-75; example item: How often do you depend on this person for help, advice or sympathy?). We have also added two items related to programmatic activities that are only relevant to high school students. Assessment of exposure to i2i activities is included in our current approved follow-up survey, but since youth can become an Ambassador once they are in high school, we added this question to capture that experience: Experiences as an i2i Ambassador (items 58b, 59).

All of these constructs are within our original approval for the constructs that comprise this follow-up survey; however, some questions in these areas are most appropriate for high school vs. middle school students. For example, substance use and sexual activity are much more common in high school than middle school necessitating a slight change in the way this information is captured. As recent work has shown that sexual minority youth experience dating violence more frequently than heterosexual youth, sexual minority status is a risk factor that has been added to understand differences in prevalence and program effects for these youth. Because we are requesting to add a small number of questions, but also expect that high school youth will be able to complete questions more quickly than middle school youth, we are also increasing the burden for this instrument from 45 minutes to 50 minutes. Please note that we have approval to follow the youth who consent to participate in the study, so we are not adding participants, we are simply modifying the survey for youth who matriculate into high school during the follow-up period.

These changes are reflected in the revised Supporting Statement A (burden tables and Section 15 [description of changes]) and Supporting Statement B (p. 3 in last sentence in “Population” paragraph).

Changes result in an overall increase in burden and burden cost:

	Total Burden Hours	Total Burden Cost
Approved	27,923	$374,389.09
Proposed	28,814	$380,848.84
Difference	891	$6,459.75

Program Contact: Andra Tharp, PhD Submission Date: September 3, 2013