Justification for change

JUSTIFICATION FOR CHANGE

MRIP FISHING EFFORT SURVEY

OMB CONTROL NO. 0648-0652

The MRIP Fishing Effort Survey (FES) was designed to be a more accurate and cost effective alternative to the Coastal Household Telephone Survey (CHTS, OMB Control No. 0648-0652), the methodology historically used to collect recreational fishing effort data. We propose a supplemental information collection to test a web version of the FES design. The information collection will result in further improvements to the FES design by providing additional data quality measures and more timely access to survey data.

A total of 67,000 households will be included to the web experiment, allocated across four states, three reference waves and two experimental treatments (Table 1). The two experimental treatments include 1) a push-to-web design that will use mail contacts to encourage web response before sending a paper questionnaire, and 2) a web-only design that will evaluate measurement error in the FES by including automated data quality checks. The experiment will measure:

1) overall response rates, 2) the average number of days to complete the survey, 3) demographic characteristics of web respondents versus pencil and paper respondents, and 4) differences in survey measures between the two experimental treatments and between the experimental treatments and the FES.

Table 1. Estimated sample size for each experimental treatment

State	Wave 5 (2018)	Wave 6 (2018)	Wave 1 (2019)
FL	1585	1423	1181
MA	2658	6196
NY	2841	5642
NC	2292	3331	6386

The anticipated burden for this request is approximately 24,000 responses and 4,000 hours. We will accommodate this additional burden by uniformly reducing FES sampling levels among all states and reference waves such that there will be no net increase in overall annual burden.