Note to Reviewer

April 30, 2013

MEMORANDUM FOR: Reviewer of 1220-0050

FROM: JAY RYAN, Chief

Division of Consumer Expenditure (CE) Surveys

Bureau of Labor Statistics

SUBJECT: Non-substantive Change Request for the

Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey (CEQ) – 2013 Sampling Questions

CE is involved in an ongoing effort to improve data quality, maintain or increase response rates, and reduce data collection costs. To further this effort, as specified in the 2013 CE clearance package, CE plans to field an Individual Diary Feasibility study to test the affects of offering multiple modes as well as individual diaries on data quality (a separate NCR will be submitted for this test once the details of the test are available).

In order to most efficiently sample for the Individual Diary Feasibility study, CE is requesting clearance to add two questions to the existing CE Interview Survey. These questions will ask about smartphone use among household members and will enable CE to provide Census with information that can be used for targeted sampling. (See Attachment A – Instrument Requirements Smartphone Use Questions.)

These questions will be asked for 3 months, from July through September 2013. Expert review by staff members of both the CE program office and the BLS Office of Survey Methods and Research has been performed on these questions.

BLS estimates that the addition of these two questions will require an additional 52 burden hours. This estimate is based upon the following assumptions:

	Mins.	Sample	Total Hours
Estimated time for addition of two smartphone questions	.371	8,4362	52

Current OMB approval of the CE surveys is scheduled to expire March 31, 2016.

If you have any questions about this request, please contact Jay Ryan at 202-691-5139 or e-mail at [email protected] or Peggy Murphy at 202-691-6186 or e-mail at [email protected].

1 This estimate was obtained from production audit trails by calculating the average time per question for similarly formatted questions, then summing the average time for each of the two question formats.

2 This estimate is based on the number of completed interviews per month averaged over the three most recent available months.