TruckerCrimesSupportingStatementPartA 3.10.20 FINAL

Department of Transportation

Office of the Chief Information Officer

SUPPORTING STATEMENT

Crime Prevention for Truckers

INTRODUCTION

This is to request the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) clearance for a new information collection titled, Crime Prevention for Truckers.

Part A. Justification

1. CIRCUMSTANCES THAT MAKE THE COLLECTION OF INFORMATION NECESSARY

FMCSA has accumulated evidence, both documentary and anecdotal, for a serious pattern of crimes related to harassment and assaults against female and minority male truckers. For example, Security Journal, in a 2006 article entitled “Workplace Violence against Female Long-haul Truckers,” reported that forty-two percent of female long-haul truckers reported experiencing one or more types of workplace violence. USA Today, in a 2017 article entitled, “Rigged,” gave accounts of repeated harassment of minority male truckers.

Currently, FMCSA does not provide materials or training to truckers, including minority male and female truckers, on the problem of how to protect themselves from being stalked, harassed, assaulted, or robbed. Before effective solutions to reducing harassment and assaults against female and minority truckers can be developed and implemented, one must understand the prevalence, seriousness, and nature of the problem of harassment and assaults against truckers. Currently, there is insufficient data. The frequency of assaults occurring, the portion that are unreported, and reasons for underreporting are unknown.

The purpose of this research study is to gather information to answer these questions, to understand how serious the problem is, and to report it to FMCSA so the Agency can decide on further options for evaluation and action. FMCSA needs to address the problem of preventing crimes, especially against female and minority men truckers for two reasons. First, there seems to be a perception among these subpopulations of truckers that they are more vulnerable than others. Second, there is a critical shortage of truckers, and helping these subpopulations of truckers to protect themselves from crimes would draw more truckers into these subpopulations and stem turnover to alleviate the shortage of commercial drivers in the motor carrier industry.

2. HOW, BY WHOM, AND FOR WHAT PURPOSE IS THE INFORMATION USED
   
   

FMCSA has contracted with Battelle to create and execute a study of truck drivers to gather this information. This exploratory survey will be the first of its kind, so it will be limited in scale and scope. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data by FMCSA and Battelle will help the Agency to understand the nature and extent of the problem and begin to formulate an approach to reducing the problem. The results will not be used for rulemaking.

The survey will be limited to professional female and minority male truck drivers selected based on a convenience sampling method. The survey will ask whether the drivers have experienced race- or gender-related harassment or assaults on the job. If the driver has had such an experience, the survey will ask follow-up questions on where and when the incidents occurred, any information the respondent knows about the perpetrator, and whether the respondent reported the incident. Some respondents will take the survey online, and others will take it in the form of an in-person interview. No personal identification information will be asked about the respondent or perpetrators.

Minority male truck drivers significantly outnumber female truck drivers of any race. The survey will attempt to reach 400 female drivers and 400 minority male drivers who have experienced on-the-job harassment or assault. The overall number of drivers in each category is sufficiently large that a finite population correction is not required and selecting equal numbers of each allows estimates of each with the same margin of error. Identical questions will be asked of all drivers, but answers from males and females will be analyzed separately.

Survey Content

FMCSA has posed several specific questions to be answered in the study. The questions, along with the specific survey questions (see “Survey on Crime Prevention for Truckers”), are of the following types:

• How common is harassment and assault against female and minority truck drivers?

  • Survey questions Q13 through Q23 (These are the questions that must be answered to qualify for the $25 incentive.)

• What is the nature of the problem?

  • Survey questions Q13 through Q23, Q32 through Q54, and Q61

• Where and when do these incidents occur?

  • Survey questions Q25 to Q31

• What is the frequency of these assaults?

  • Survey questions Q13 through Q21

• How many of these incidents go unreported and why?

  • Survey questions Q55 to Q60

The first 12 questions on the survey questionnaire ask for background and demographics. People who begin the survey but do not pass the screening questions will be thanked and dismissed.

The screening questions ask whether the respondent drives a truck regulated by FMCSA and has professional experience in the past two years. Age, gender, ethnicity, and race are asked. Answers to screening questions are required, and a respondent is dismissed as soon as a disqualifying answer is given. The core of the survey is contained in questions 13 through 23. They ask whether the respondent has experienced one or more of nine specific classes of harassment or assault and offer the respondent the opportunity to describe an incident that is not on the pre-selected list. To qualify for the $25 incentive, respondents must answer all of questions 13 through 21 (even if they did not experience the type of incident) or describe an incident in question 23. The remainder of the survey focuses on one of the classes of incident and asks follow-up questions (e.g., where, who, when, etc.). Where possible, questions are patterned after the National Crime Victimization Study. The survey asks whether the incident was reported to authorities, the nature of the response if it was, and the reasons if it was not. The final question is open-ended, allowing the respondent to describe any information that may have been missed and inviting the respondent to make suggestions.

Skip patterns within the survey will ensure only those questions that a respondent needs to answer will be shown (or asked in the case of an in-person interview), avoiding any irrelevant or extraneous data and undue burden on respondents’ time. A pilot study of nine or fewer drivers will pre-test the questionnaire prior to the main survey to ensure they fully meet specifications and function as anticipated.

Recruiting

We will recruit through a number of methods, including intercepts at truck stops and social media. Drivers will be intercepted in at least four locations spread around the United States to provide geographic diversity; no stratification is planned. At least two candidate locations will be identified in each region, and the final selection will be randomized. Recruiting materials will identify the target population and say that the survey is about harassment and assaults.

Project staff who recruit in person and who administer the survey in person will be familiar with the truck driving profession. They will be drivers themselves, retirees from motor carrier inspection personnel or a similar career. Project staff having personal contact with respondents will be females or minority males. These staff will be trained in human subject protection and in the procedures of this project.

Drivers who are greeted in person will be able to take the survey in person or electronically at a nearby kiosk. Drivers who are first met in person but do not take the survey immediately will be given a piece of paper with the Paperwork Reduction Act statement, informed consent statement, and a web address where they can take the survey online using their own computer or phone at their convenience. Drivers recruited through e-mail or social media will also be directed to a web site. The survey questions will be identical in all cases. In-person interviews will provide richer data. They are expected to have a higher response rate because the interviews will be conducted before the potential respondents have the opportunity to forget to take the survey. The immediate cash incentive of the in-person interviews is also expected to promote participation. Respondents who complete the survey will be offered a $25 incentive. Drivers who take the survey with a project staff member will be given cash; those taking it online will have a choice of gift cards.

A maximum of 440 males and 440 females will be included in the final results to cap the resources and effort while maximizing the potential to get as close as possible to 400 responses with specific recent experience of harassment or assault. Some individuals may be eligible to participate in the survey but will not have had any recent experience of harassment or assault. These individuals will be included in the final results for calculation of prevalence. The total number of respondents targeted for those who experienced some sort of harassment or assault will be 400 in each group. If 400 targeted individuals are reached before the overall cap of 440 respondents, data collection will be stopped for that group. Individuals who are screened but fail to qualify as females or minority males, or with other criteria such as not being active drivers, will not be included in the interview counts, though a tabulation of the number of such contacts and reason for their disqualification will be reported to better understand resource needs and burden in future data collection efforts of this type.

The survey will be anonymous. None of the questions that will be asked could personally identify the respondent or any other individuals involved. Survey instructions remind the respondent not to include names or other identifying information. Before analysis begins, project staff will read the responses and remove any facts or combinations of facts that could potentially identify an individual or an organization. Battelle will request a waiver of documented informed consent because the documentation would be the only connection between the respondent and the answers.

Analysis

The majority of the questions on the survey can be answered by selecting one or more fixed responses. This type of response can be readily analyzed by quantitative statistical methods. Patterns between types of crimes, locations of incidents, and characteristics of the perpetrators will be observed, and hypotheses will be formulated and tested. The prevalence of different kinds of assaults and harassment will be estimated both as the proportion of respondents indicating any assault or harassment over a two-year period, as well as a crime rate calculated as the total number of such incidents per individual per year. The proportion of individuals that choose not to report an incident to authorities will also be estimated. Both measures of central tendency such as means or medians will be reported as well as an indication of variability through confidence intervals. A small number of questions in the survey are open-ended. Most importantly, respondents will be invited to describe an event of harassment or assault that is not on the pre-determined list. Some of the responses will certainly be unique, but others may fit common patterns. Free responses will be analyzed qualitatively.

The data will be analyzed at first by Battelle. Battelle statisticians experienced in surveys and in analyzing data for FMCSA will execute the plan. Battelle is required to deliver a public-use dataset at the conclusion of the project. This dataset will include all of the essential responses to the surveys, and personally identifiable information (PII) will have been redacted. This dataset will be available to other researchers who wish to further analyze the data according to their own pursuits.

This exploratory study has several boundaries to be acknowledged. The target sample size is sufficient for estimating the prevalence of harassment and assaults within the population. The number of respondents who have experienced an incident may be too small to estimate statistics for other answers with a high confidence. The convenience sample will not allow us to stratify the sampling beyond the separation of female and minority male drivers, and the sample size is too small to draw conclusions about subpopulations, such as older or younger drivers or particular minority groups. There is no control group of white male drivers. A literature review as part of this study identified sources of information on harassment in the workplace in general and in other fields. Individuals who did not become truck drivers because of incidents they experienced during their training will be excluded by the survey questions requiring recent truck driving experience. This population will be difficult to locate and must be left for a later study. Respondents will be asked to count incidents they experienced in the past two years. This is a longer recall period than is common in crime studies and respondents may not be able to accurately recall dates from more than a few months ago. With a limited budget for recruiting respondents, this allows a greater total exposure period for events to have occurred, albeit at a likely cost of precision in memory. For a similar reason, respondents will be asked to report all locations a certain incident occurred in the past two years. Typically, a survey of this type would ask the respondent to select only the most recent incident, randomizing the selection and ensuring a fresh memory. The project team decided to announce the topic of harassment and assaults in outreach materials to attract more drivers with experience on the circumstances of these events, conscious that self-selection can bias a prevalence estimate.

Purpose

FMCSA has an interest in the safety of motor carrier personnel and, among other things, in the free movement of freight throughout the country. By understanding the nature and prevalence of harassment and assaults against truckers, FMCSA will be able to formulate and promote programs to address the problem. One potential area of focus could be updating the agency’s CDL training curriculum. The report will be published on the Agency’s web site so that the general public will be aware of the findings. It may be useful to law enforcement personnel, motor carriers, operators of private truck stops, and others in their efforts to address the situation.

3. EXTENT OF AUTOMATED INFORMATION COLLECTION
   
   

The information will be collected through a combination of an online survey and in-person interviews. Approximately 160 in-person interviews will be completed, 80 females and 80 minority males. The others (approximately 720) will take the survey electronically.

Respondents to the in-person interviews will not handle paper to give their answers and the expected duration of the survey is the same. Respondents to the online survey will be able to participate at a time and place that is convenient to them.

4. EFFORTS TO IDENTIFY DUPLICATION
   
   

Battelle searched published literature for information relevant to the topic and submitted the results of the review to FMCSA. Anecdotes and dated studies of drivers being harassed or mistreated were available, but no formal recent research specifically on crimes against female and minority male truckers had been published. A new survey is needed to focus on the extent of crimes against female and minority male truck drivers.

5. EFFORTS TO MINIMIZE THE BURDEN ON SMALL BUSINESSES
   
   Many of the drivers to be interviewed will be self-employed owners of their own truck tractor. These drivers can be considered working for small businesses. The questionnaire for this survey has been designed to require less than 20 minutes and drivers completing it will be compensated for their time. The information collection is voluntary. Drivers on schedules, if they cannot accommodate even a small delay, can forego the survey. The online questionnaire will allow drivers to participate at a later time that does not interfere with their driving schedule.

To reiterate, skip patterns within the survey will ensure only those questions that a respondent needs to answer will be shown (or asked in the case of an in-person interview), avoiding any irrelevant or extraneous data and undue burden on respondents’ time. A pilot study of nine or fewer drivers will pre-test the questionnaire prior to the main survey to ensure they fully meet specifications and function as anticipated.

6. IMPACT OF LESS FREQUENT COLLECTION OF INFORMATION
   
   This request is to collect information from a set of respondents at one time only. There are no follow-up, additional, or supplementary surveys.

7. SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES
   
   There are no special circumstances that would cause this collection to be conducted in a manner inconsistent with OMB guidelines.

8. COMPLIANCE WITH 5 CFR 1320.8:
   
   To achieve compliance with 5 CFR 1320.8, a sixty (60) day notice was published in the Federal Register. Three generally supportive comments were received from women that are representative of the trucking industry. And, while no comments were received that were explicitly against conducting the survey, one commenter believed that the issue was urgent enough such that the agency should take immediate action to address it. The agency plans to publish a thirty (30) day notice in the Federal Register and this section will be updated after it is published and the comment period closes.

9. PAYMENTS OR GIFTS TO RESPONDENTS
   
   Persons responding to the in-person interview or the online survey will be given an incentive of $25, roughly equivalent to the wage they would earn in an hour. The incentive will be given to respondents who are eligible—they must report that they are female or a minority male who has driven a truck professionally in the past two years—and complete the survey at least through the initial questions of what events they have experienced (Q21 in the survey).

A respondent who completes an in-person interview or the survey at an attended kiosk will be given an envelope with cash. There will be absolutely no record of the individual. Respondents who complete the online survey will be told they can click a button to be directed to a separate web site for payment. The separate site will have no way of associating the information on the recipient of the payment with the responses to the survey.

10. ASSURANCE OF CONFIDENTIALITY
    
    Respondents will be told during the informed consent process that the survey is anonymous. The survey does not ask the respondent’s name. It reminds the respondent in more than one place not to use names of companies or other people. If a name is entered, it will be redacted from the public-use dataset by Battelle. Battelle will also examine responses for combinations of information that could be assembled to constitute PII. For example, if the length of a certain highway in one state is short and has only a single public rest area, then references to an event in a public rest area on that highway in that state may need to be obscured.

The online surveys will be conducted using a commercial service such as SurveyMonkey. The team will select a survey provider that collects only the information that its customers request it to collect. Most pertinently, the survey will not record the IP address of respondents, and there will be no way to trace back to the device that respondents used to take the survey. While a data breach is conceivably possible at any organization, the provider’s policy will be that its customers (in this case Battelle) own the survey data and the provider makes no use of the data. Therefore, responses will be kept confidential from unauthorized users.

In the case of in-person interviews, the interviewer will not record names of people or organizations. As with the online survey, responses will be scrutinized for combinations of items that could potentially reveal identifying information.

Battelle maintains an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure that all proposed research protocols and ongoing research activities meet requirements set forth in these rules. Battelle’s IRB is registered with DHHS’s Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) and with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as IRB00000284, approved to 5 September 2020. Battelle will request from the IRB a formal waiver of documented consent. No human subject’s signature will be required, because it would be the sole document linking the subject to participation in the research. Respondents interviewed in person will hear the informed consent statement from the interviewer and will be asked to give their verbal consent. They will be given a piece of paper that contains the informed consent statement and resources for harassment and assaults. Respondents who visit the web site for the survey will see the informed consent statement on the landing page. Their clicking a “continue” button to proceed to the survey’s questions will constitute their consent.

Battelle is firmly committed to ensuring that the rights, welfare, and privacy of individuals are protected when they participate in research. The Battelle approach to protecting human subjects is guided by commonly accepted ethical principles and guidelines, including respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, as set forth in the Belmont Report. These ethical principles have been legally codified in Title 45 CFR Part 46 and Subpart A and have been adopted by other federal agencies, including the Department of Transportation, as the “Common Rule.” Battelle assures its commitments through adherence to the Terms of Assurance for its DHHS Federal Wide Assurance FWA#00004696, approved to 13 September 2022.

All Battelle staff members who engage human subjects or who have access to human subjects’ private, identifiable information will complete human subjects training with refresher training every two years. Training is provided through the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI). CITI training is internationally recognized as “high quality” and is used by hundreds of U.S. institutions of higher learning as well as some federal agencies.

All responses to the survey questionnaire will be used to create a database. Battelle maintains a secure environment to protect against unauthorized access, modification, destruction, or disclosure of data. Electronic data will be stored securely within Battelle’s internal network on designated servers and workstations and will be backed up nightly to reduce the possibility of data loss. Battelle regularly handles PII for human subjects on sensitive topics and will employ established procedures for doing so, with access limited to project staff and security standards appropriate for data with PII.

The information that appears in the public use dataset will not include PII, such as names or employer, that could lead to identification of a particular respondent.

11. JUSTIFICATION FOR COLLECTION OF SENSITIVE INFORMATION
    
    An important topic of this research is sexual harassment and sexual crimes. The survey will ask about crimes and the surrounding circumstances. None of the questions will ask the respondents to express their own attitudes or behavior regarding sexuality. The survey data collection does not contain additional questions related to matters that are commonly considered sensitive or private.

No PII will be intentionally collected, and no potentially identifying information will be published.

12. ESTIMATE OF BURDEN HOURS FOR INFORMATION REQUESTED

Battelle will collect data through in-person interviews and an online survey. The design calls for a total of 800 respondents (400 each female and minority male) to reach the end of the survey, or a cap of 880 respondents eligible to participate. Approximately 160 in-person interviews will be completed, 80 females and 80 minority males. The balance will take the survey electronically. The in-person interview and online survey will consist of identical questions, and respondents to the in-person interview are expected to incur the same burden as those responding to the online survey. However, the time required to complete the questions will depend on the respondent’s answers.

For the purpose of estimating burden hours incurred by respondents, FMCSA separates potential respondents into three groups: 1) those that are not female and minority male truck drivers; 2) female and minority male truck drivers who report no harassment or assault; and 3) female and minority male truck drivers who do report an incident of harassment or assault. The estimated number of respondents falling into each category, the information collection length and burden are outlined in Table 1.

Any individual who is not a female or minority male truck driver will be screened out by Question 12. Those individuals are unlikely to attempt the survey because all recruiting and publicity materials will state clearly that the survey is for female and minority male truck drivers. For this reason, FMCSA assumes the number of ineligible individuals that attempt the survey and the associated burden are negligible.

Table 1. Estimated Number of Respondents Burden Category

Group	Leave the survey by	Expected number	Estimated time per respondent
Ineligible individuals	Question 12	negligible	negligible
Eligible respondents who report no harassment or assault	Question 23	80	8 minutes
Eligible respondents who report harassment or assault	(end)	800	20 minutes
TOTAL	--	880	--

Eligible respondents that report no harassment or assault will end the in-person interview or online survey at Question 23. The time to respond to the multiple-choice questions leading to this point is approximately eight minutes. An eligible respondent that does report an incident of harassment or assault will complete the entire survey and incur a burden of approximately 20 minutes.

FMCSA does not know the precise proportion of respondents who will report an incident of harassment or assault. However, the Agency expects a sizable majority of eligible individuals will report at least one form of harassment, and it relies on two publications to estimate the proportion. Table 2 contains a rough calculation of a lower bound for the proportion who will report an incident. The table estimates the proportion of females in transportation occupations who would experience a violent crime in a year. Three of the numbers in the table are from a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. ¹ The fourth number was calculated using ratios. The numbers from the report are that, when all occupations are counted, all workers experience workplace violence at a rate of 5.1 per 1,000 workers every year. Females experience workplace violence at a rate of only 4.1 per 1,000 per year. The calculation assumes that this ratio (4.1/5.1) holds for transportation occupations. If the assumption holds, then of 1,000 females in transportation, 10.1 would experience a violent crime in a year (12.6 × 4.1/5.1 = 10.1). The category of transportation occupations (other than bus driver or taxi cab driver) is broader than truck drivers, and female truck drivers are suspected to be subject to more events than females in office transportation jobs. Also, this report is limited to violent crimes, while the proposed survey questionnaire asks for property crimes, threats, and harassment as well. Therefore, the number of respondents reporting an incident and completing the entire survey should be higher.

Table 2. Average Annual Rate of Workplace Nonfatal Violence per 1,000 Persons Age 16 or Older

Population	All occupations	Transportation occupations (other than bus driver or taxi cab driver)
Total	5.1 (SE=0.27)	12.6 (SE=2.15)
Female	4.1 (SE=0.33)	10.1* (SE)

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics

* estimated by a proportion from the three other numbers

The second source to estimate the proportion of respondents who will report an incident is an analysis of data from the National Survey of Workplace Health and Safety. ² This survey is valuable because it includes both psychological aggression and physical violence. Psychological aggression was characterized by five phrases ranging from “shouted obscenities at you or screamed at you in anger” to “threatened you with a knife, gun, or another weapon.” Physical violence was characterized by four phrases ranging from “pushed you, grabbed you, or slapped you in anger” to “attacked you with a knife, gun, or another weapon.” Although the survey recorded respondents’ occupation, the categories were not sufficiently fine to identify truck drivers or even transportation workers. In this telephone survey, workers were asked whether they had experienced “never,” “less than once a month,” or in four categories of higher frequency. Of all survey respondents, 41.4 percent reported experiencing psychological aggression at work, and 6.0 percent reported physical violence. Table 3 lists the prevalence of psychological aggression and physical violence for the overall working population and for males, females, whites, and minorities.

Table 3. Prevalence of Aggression and Violence Experienced at Work, All Occupations

Population	Psychological aggression	Physical violence
Overall	41.4	6.0
Male	43.3	5.3
Female	39.4	6.9
White	41.6	5.5
Minority	40.9	7.5

Source: Schat et al.

For the purposes of this ICR, FMCSA conservatively assumes that 80 of the 880 respondents will report no harassment or assault. These respondents will exit the in-person interview or online survey at Question 23. Each respondent reporting no incident will incur a burden of approximately 8 minutes, resulting in a burden of 10.7 hours (80 respondents × (8 minutes ÷ 60 minutes per hour)). The remaining 800 respondents, assumed to report an incident of harassment or assault, will spend 20 minutes each completing the full in-person interview or online survey, resulting in a burden of 266.7 hours (800 respondents × (20 minutes ÷ 60 minutes per hour)). The information collection is expected to result in a total burden of 277.4 hours as detailed in Table 4.

Table 4. Estimated number of respondents, responses, burden hours, and burden hour costs.

Group	Number of Respondents (a)	Responses per Respondent (b)	Number of Responses (a × b = c)	Average Burden Hours per Response (d)	Total Burden (c × d = e)	Total Burden Hour Cost (e × $31.86)
Report no harassment or assault	80	1	80	0.133	10.7	$340
Report harassment or assault	800	1	800	0.333	266.7	$8,495
TOTAL	880	--	880	--	277.4	$8,835

Totals may not add due to rounding.

To estimate burden hour costs, the Agency assumes that the respondent occupation for the information collection corresponds to Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers (Standard Occupational Classification 53-3032). The median hourly wage for Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers is $20.42.³

A loaded hourly wage is obtained by adding the value of hourly fringe benefits to the median hourly wage. The Agency estimates a fringe benefits rate of 56 percent of median hourly wage, or $11.44 per hour ($20.42 × 0.56). The 56 percent fringe benefits rate was calculated by dividing the total benefits costs for private industry workers of the transportation and warehousing industry segment ($13.92) by the average hourly value of wages and salaries ($24.71) as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for December 2017.⁴ Adding the dollar value of hourly fringe benefits to the median hourly wage for Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers results in a loaded hourly wage of $31.86 ($20.42 + $11.44).

As detailed in Table 4, the total burden hour cost for this information collection is $8,835. This includes $340 for the 80 respondents that do not report an incident of harassment or assault which are expected to incur a total burden hour cost of (80 respondents × 1 response per respondent × (8 minutes ÷ 60 minutes per hour) × $31.86 per hour); and $8,495 for the 800 respondents that complete the full survey (800 respondents × 1 response per respondent × (20 minutes ÷ 60 minutes per hour) × $31.86 per hour).

Totals for this ICR:

Estimated Total Annual Burden Hours: 277.4 hours

Estimated Total Respondents: 880 respondents

Estimated Total Annual Responses: 880 responses

Estimated Total Annual Burden Costs: $8,835

13. ESTIMATE OF TOTAL ANNUAL COSTS TO RESPONDENTS
    
    There are no additional costs to respondents.

13. ESTIMATE OF COST TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
    
    The contract for the Crime Prevention for Truckers Study is a Firm Fixed Price Contract totaling $285,831 ($95,277 annually), which includes $226,831 in direct labor and consultant costs; $35,000 in travel costs; and $24,000 in other direct costs, including peer review. The research design, protocol development, and implementation of the research methods will be completed during a 36-month period beginning September 2017 and ending September 2020.

Oversight of the study will be carried out by a General Schedule 14 Program Manager. The labor cost of this activity is estimated to be $73.92 per hour, comprising $48.53 in hourly wages,⁵ employee benefits equal to 36.25 percent of wages, and overhead expenses equal to 12 percent of wages and benefits [($48.53 × (1 + 0.36)) × (1 + 0.12)].⁶ FMCSA estimates that oversight tasks require 4 hours each week for the duration of the 3‑year contract, totaling 624 hours (4 hours × 52 weeks × 3 years). The estimated Federal staff support is $46,126 ($73.92 × 4 × 52 × 3), or $15,375 annually.

Estimated Total Annual Cost to Federal Government: $110,652.

($95,277 in contractor costs + $15,375 in Federal staff support)

13. EXPLANATION OF PROGRAM CHANGES OR ADJUSTMENTS
    
    This is a new information collection therefore there is an increase of annual 277.4 burden hours and annual $8,835 burden costs.

13. PUBLICATION OF RESULTS OF DATA COLLECTION
    
    FMCSA plans to publish a report to document this information collection, including analysis of the results. Furthermore, a public-use dataset will be released so that other researchers can analyze the data in different ways. The survey will be implemented beginning in June 2020, pending OMB approval of the request. Data collection is scheduled to be completed in October 2020. Battelle’s submission of the final report is scheduled for March 2021. Following review by the publication office, the report should be available to the public in late calendar 2021.

13. APPROVAL FOR NOT DISPLAYING THE EXPIRATION DATE OF OMB APPROVAL
    
    

The Agency is not requesting approval for not displaying the expiration date.

13. EXCEPTIONS TO CERTIFICATION STATEMENT
    
    The information collection being requested requires no exceptions.

1 Special Report on Workplace Violence 1993-2009. March 2011. Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/wv09.pdf.

2 Schat, A.C.H., M.R. Frone, and E.K. Kelloway, “Prevalence of workplace aggression in the U.S. workforce.” Chapter 4 in B.K. Holoway, J. Barling, and J.J. Hurrell (eds) Handbook of Workplace Violence. Sage: Thousand Oaks, California. 2006.

3 Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment Statistics, May 2017 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, United States, www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm. Accessed April 11, 2018.

4 Bureau of Labor Statistics. December 2017 Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC), Table 10, www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ecec_03202018.pdf. Accessed April 11, 2018.

5 Office of Personnel Management. 2018 General Schedule (Base). https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2018/GS_h.pdf. Accessed May 25, 2018.

6 Office of Management and Budget. Circular No. A-76 (Revised). https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/circulars/A76/a76_incl_tech_correction.pdf. Accessed May 25, 2018.

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