SPPA Pilot Study Nonsubstantive Change Justification

Justification for No Material/Nonsubstantive Change (OMB No. 3135-0136)

April 12, 2016

This request for a Nonsubstantive Change is needed for the Pilot SPPA instrument to correct for minor typos and other minor grammar errors in a couple of survey items. For example, the questions stems for MAQ2A through MAQ2J included “3 or 4 times a week but not every month” as an option, but should have reflected the coded response option, which is “3 or 4 times a year but not every month.” These minor changes are necessary to ensure that the survey instrument is accurately programmed and administered to respondents.

In addition, to reduce respondent burden and duplication, we will be using demographic information already collected from the NORC AmeriSpeak panel respondents; the sample for the Pilot Study will be drawn from this panel. Many of the demographic questions that we will use for analysis of the Pilot Study data are equivalent to the demographic questions included in the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), and thus we felt it unnecessary and burdensome to ask the respondents these demographic questions again in the Pilot. However, in using the AmeriSpeak demographic information, it was also deemed necessary to add two additional screener demographic questions (MEQ6AA and MEQ7AA) to the pilot study instrument since no equivalent questions were asked of the AmeriSpeak panel respondents. These two questions refer to whether a respondent had any children in the household either 4 years old or younger, or between ages 5 and 17 years old, respectively. We have also added a necessary additional screener demographic question for Core 1 respondents who had spouse/partners at the time they completed the AmeriSpeaks demographic question but may have changed their marital status since then (see footnote #3 in the Pilot Study Instrument).