Note to Reviewer

January 29, 2018

MEMORANDUM FOR Reviewer of 1220-0157

FROM Alison Aughinbaugh

Division of National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS)

Bureau of Labor Statistics

SUBJECT R19 Interim Contact

This note requests approval for an interim contact with members in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (NLSY97). We request approval to undertake a contact effort in February and March of 2019 in anticipation of the fielding of Round 19 data collection beginning three to six months thereafter and extending into summer 2020.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (NLSY97), began as an annual in-person survey and continued in that vein through its 15^th round of data collection, which began in the fall of 2011 and concluded the following spring. Having transitioned in 2013 (Round 16) to a biennial in-person data collection schedule, it underwent a second transition in 2017 (Round 18) as data collection moved to primarily telephone data collection for the first time in its 20 year history.

The focus of our proposed interim contact strategy is to better understand what types of information about the survey sample members find engaging or interesting. Knowing what communications sample members find appealing allows us to better customize communications to them so that we can have fewer but more effective interactions with them that will improve their experiences as sample members while allowing the agency to allocate its resources most effectively. To do this, we will design an experiment to measure the extent to gauge which topics are of most interest to respondents, and whether the frequency and content of the communications affects the response we get to the contact information updates.

As mentioned previously, we propose to send emails to respondents in February and March. For the subset of respondents without emails on file, we will send print versions in March only. These emails and mailings will reinforce the importance of their data in the NLSY and encourage them to complete a contact update card. None of the collected information is for public release, only to inform internal project practices. In particular, we anticipate achieving the following through this effort:

• Understanding the effect of interim contact frequency on engagement with the NLSY97.

• Learning about respondents’ interests in topics and news sources that might pertain to the NLSY97, as well as their interest in applications of NLSY97 data in different settings to inform development of project communications.

• Collecting updated locator information to facilitate respondent contact and avert sample attrition due to non-contact.

• Increasing respondents’ understanding of the NLSY97 and its value and relevance.

• Maintaining contact with respondents to nurture feelings of engagement, particularly in the absence of annual data collection.

Below, we provide more information on the content of these communications as well as the design of our experiment.

We expect burden to increase by 23 hours due to this additional contact. We expect approximately 550 sample members to update their contact information, with an average update taking 2.5 minutes. The expect increase in burden is 1,375 minutes or approximately 23 hours.

If you have any questions about this request, please contact Alison Aughinbaugh by telephone at 202-691-7520 or by e-mail at [email protected].

Attachments

Attachment A

Attachment B

Attachment C

Content

“

Help NORC provide essential data to inform research and policymaking. Click here to make sure your contact information is up to date.

Following the link above would take respondents to the contact update form on the NORC website. The form is provided in Attachment A.

The data your cohort provided gave the following insights last year alone:

“

Each email or mailing will then contain a randomly-assigned list of insights that researchers have learned from using NLSY data. The insights that will be used are included Attachment B.

We will also include a contact information update to attempt to update their locating information. The format of this is provided in the “Contact Information Update” section below.

“

For more examples of research like this, click here.

Following this link immediately above would take the respondents to a list of insights from research. The full list is included in Attachment C.

“

We then propose to record whether the respondent clicks on this second hyperlink, and use this as a measure whether they were engaged with the material.

Experimental Design

We will randomly assign each mailing across two different dimensions (i.e., a factorial randomized design):

1. Frequency of contacts

   1. Emails will be randomly assigned with equal probability to the following frequencies:

      1. One email (last month)

      2. Two emails (both months)

   2. Hardcopy mailings will not be randomly assigned in terms of frequency and will only be sent once in the last month.

2. Content

   1. Emails will be randomly assigned with equal probability to one of the content groups listed in the “Bulleted Information” section below.

   2. Hardcopy mailings will be randomly assigned to one of two groups (groups 3 and 4).

We will examine two different outcomes in the experiment: 1) (for emails only) the fraction of respondents who click on the link for more research (a measure of engagement with the material), and 2) (for both groups) the fraction of respondents who complete the contact information update.