OMB Memo

Respondent Privacy and Confidentiality Concerns Survey

Submitted Under Generic Clearance for Internet Nonprobability Panel Pretesting

Request: The Census Bureau plans to conduct additional research under the generic clearance for Internet Nonprobability Panel Pretesting (OMB #0607-0978). We will be administering an online survey designed to measure respondent privacy and confidentiality concerns for the 2020 Census using a questionnaire refined by two rounds of cognitive interviews previously conducted under the generic clearance for questionnaire pretesting (OMB #0607-0725).

Purpose: The purpose of conducting this survey is to measure individuals’ privacy risk tolerance with the goal of informing the privacy loss budgets allowed in mathematical privacy models for decennial data releases. Responses to the questionnaire items provide information about respondent concerns surrounding each of the different pieces of individual and household-level information collected on the 2020 Census and included in statistical summaries released by the Census Bureau. To achieve its research objectives, the survey will need to be administered to a large number of respondents drawn from a nationally-representative sample of households.

The full questionnaire is attached (see Attachment I: Respondent Privacy and Confidentiality Concerns Questionnaire). As in the cognitive testing, we intend to administer an abbreviated decennial census questionnaire to respondents, followed by a series of privacy risk perception questions developed by our research team. The privacy risk questions focus on the specific types of data collected in the decennial questionnaire, as well as types of data not collected in decennial to provide a baseline. To our knowledge, there is no other source of information about respondent privacy concerns for decennial items that has been collected from a large, nationally-representative sample of households.

This collection is a proof-of-concept for the large nationally-representative sample. This smaller scale test will help determine whether the larger test will yield the useful results intended. The information collected in the larger, representative survey will be used by experts within the Census Bureau to help make policy decisions about the differential privacy protections associated with 2020 Census data releases.

Population of Interest: Residents of the United States and its territories.

Timeline: We intend to conduct this survey with a non-probability sample drawn from the Census Bureau’s Contact Frame in March 2019. The survey will be open for a period of two weeks after the first email invitation is sent.

Sample: In March 2019, Census Bureau staff will sample 20,000 MAFIDs from the Census Bureau’s Contact Frame. The Contact Frame includes email addresses and phone numbers purchased from third party vendors and matched with addresses from the Master Address File. Based on past use of this frame, we expect a 1% response rate. Our goal is 200 complete responses so that we can detect a 5-10% difference in privacy concerns depending on the prevalence of concerns in the sample.

Recruitment: Respondents will be invited to respond to the online survey by means of a series of emails containing a link to the survey (see Attachment II: Respondent Privacy and Confidentiality Concerns Email Invitations). For this study, each email address in the sample will receive a maximum of three notification emails:

1. An initial email on a Monday,

2. A reminder email on the following Thursday (if they have not yet clicked on the link to the survey), and

3. A final reminder email on the following Monday with the survey closing the following Friday.

Each MAF-ID from the Contact Frame has up to three email addresses associated with an address. We will email all three addresses associated with a particular MAFID.

Survey Administration: The questionnaire will be administered online only using the survey platform Qualtrics. Respondents will receive an invitation with a link to the survey which will then take them to the Qualtrics instrument.

Questionnaire: The questionnaire, programmed in the online survey platform Qualtrics, will include an abbreviated decennial census questionnaire (which will provide context for the privacy risk questions while also gathering basic demographic information about respondents). The decennial questionnaire is followed by a series of privacy risk perception questions developed by our research team (see Attachment I: Respondent Privacy and Confidentiality Concerns Questionnaire). The privacy risk questions focus on the specific types of data collected in the decennial questionnaire, with particular emphasis on how concerned respondents would be if someone was able to find out the decennial census information about themselves or their household. Following the series of concern questions, respondents will be asked to report on their awareness and perceptions of various topics including risks to confidentiality (such as data breaches and reidentification), attitudes about the use of government data, internet behaviors, and privacy-seeking behavior.

Informed Consent: In the survey invitation materials, we will inform participants that their response is voluntary and that the information they provide is confidential and will be accessed only by employees involved in the research project.

Incentive: Participants will not receive any payment for their participation in the survey.

Length of Interview: We estimate that the survey will take an average of 15 minutes for each complete response. We expect 200 complete responses for a total of about 50 hours. Each email will take about 1 minute to read. Each person could get up to three emails and we will send emails to 20,000 email addresses for a total burden of 1,000 hours. The total estimated burden of this research is 1,050 hours.

Table 1. Total Estimated Burden

Category of Respondent	No. of Respondents	Participation Time	Burden
Reading email invitations	20,000	3 minutes	1,000 hours
Survey	200	15 minutes	50 hours
Totals			1,050 hours

The following documents are included as attachments:

Attachment I: Respondent Privacy and Confidentiality Concerns Questionnaire

Attachment II: Respondent Privacy and Confidentiality Concerns Email Invitations

The contact person for questions regarding data collection and the design of this research is listed below:

Aleia Fobia

Center for Survey Measurement

U.S. Census Bureau

Room 5K024E

Washington, D.C. 20233

(301) 763-4075

[email protected]

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