Non-substantive Change Request

January 2018

Non-substantive Change Request

(0535-0039) Fruit, Nuts and Specialty Crops – Fruits, Berries, and Cranberries

NASS continues to work towards improving questionnaires in order to reduce respondent burden and to improve the quality of data collected. In response to cognitive testing conducted by some of NASS’s survey methodologists with fruit producers, the following changes are being made to questionnaires.

Fruit, Berry and Cranberry questionnaires:

• Previously, NASS asked three questions relating to fresh market sales. Following our cognitive testing we are now able to make minor wording changes and combine the three into two questions.

• Minor formatting changes were made to the questions to make it easier for the respondents to follow the flow of the questions.

• For operations that left the production and disposition questions blank an additional question was added to the end of each questionnaire to see if the respondent should remain in future samples or be removed for not having the items of interest.

Grape questionnaires:

• Based on the testing that was conducted with fruit producers, the previous table format used for grapes was expanded and additional text was added to better define the information to be reported (acres, production, price, etc.).

• The question for grapes sold for commercial processing, will be collapsed into one category. In the past it was broken into grapes for juice, wine or other processing.

• The question regarding unharvested production, has been dropped since it is no longer published.

• The question regarding the production of grapes as a percent of full crop has been dropped since it is no longer published.

• For operations that left the production and disposition questions blank an additional question was added to the end of each questionnaire to see if the respondent should remain in future samples or be removed for not having the items of interest.