OMB memo

Vaccine Question Pretesting 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 #0607-0725). We will be conducting online pretesting a new series of questions concerning intention to vaccinate for COVID-19 for the Household Pulse Survey. The questions will be a part of a larger survey designed to measure social and economic impacts of COVID-19 (www.census.gov/householdpulse).

Purpose: The purpose of conducting this survey is to pretest questions on intent to vaccinate for the Household Pulse Survey.

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 Affinity Panel in December 2020. The survey will be open for a period of one week after the first email invitation is sent.

Sample: In December 2020, Census Bureau staff will sample 5,000 email addresses from the Census Bureau’s Affinity Panel. The Affinity Panel includes email addresses from individuals who signed up to participate in Census Bureau research through a link on the census.gov website. Based on past use of this frame, we expect a 2% response rate. Our minimum goal is 100 complete responses. We will cap responses at 150 completes.

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 Enclosure III: Vaccine Question 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 Wednesday (if they have not yet clicked on the link to the survey), and

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

Survey Administration: The questionnaire will be administered online 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: Respondents will receive a very short questionnaire containing only the new items. Each respondent will be asked two or three probes to gauge their comprehension of the vaccine questions and their ability to map their responses onto the response options. During analysis, open text responses will be compared to coded responses to validate (or revise) the response categories.

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. Additional required notices about confidentiality and privacy are included on the first page of the survey.

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 4 minutes for each complete response. We will allow up to 150 complete responses for a total of about 13 hours. Each email will take about 1 minute to read. Each person could get up to three emails and we will send emails to 5,000 email addresses for a total burden of 250 hours. The total estimated burden of this research is 263 hours.

Table 1. Total Estimated Burden

Category of Respondent	No. of Respondents	Participation Time	Burden
Reading email invitations	5,000	3 minutes	250 hours
Survey	150	5 minutes	13 hours
Totals			263 hours

The following documents are included as attachments:

Enclosure I: Vaccine Questionnaire

Enclosure II: Vaccine Question Email Invitations

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

Jennifer Childs and Aleia Clark Fobia

Center for Behavioral Science Methods

U.S. Census Bureau

Washington, D.C. 20233

(301) 763-4075

[email protected]

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