FastTrack Submission Form - CEPC Cognitive Testing

Request for Approval under the “Generic Clearance for the Collection of Routine Customer Feedback” (OMB Control Number: 0970-0401)

TITLE OF INFORMATION COLLECTION: Cognitive testing of a questionnaire for the Consumer Education and Parent Choice in Early Care and Education project

PURPOSE: The purpose of this information collection is to do cognitive testing of a questionnaire. The questionnaire aims to gather parent perspectives and experiences with using different information sources on child care and early education (CCEE), how they make decisions about their children’s CCEE enrollment, and information about their care arrangements, and family circumstances. The goal of this cognitive testing is to refine the survey questions by testing the full draft instrument with a variety of parents with young children located in different demographic cross-sections of the general parent population. Cognitive testing will help us determine whether respondents’ understanding of the questions match with researcher's intentions and allow our team to assess whether any survey questions or wording in items cause confusion or are unclear so that we can make needed adjustments. We will also learn about how long it takes to complete the questionnaire.

DESCRIPTION OF RESPONDENTS: The cognitive testing respondents include parents over the age of 18 with young children. This group of respondents will encompass parents who are using child care and education and those using non-parental care only.

TYPE OF COLLECTION:

[ ] Customer Comment Card/Complaint Form [ ] Customer Satisfaction Survey

[ ] Usability Testing (e.g., Website or Software [ ] Small Discussion Group

[ ] Focus Group [ x] Other: _Cognitive interviews to refine questions on a questionnaire

CERTIFICATION:

I certify the following to be true:

1. The collection is voluntary.

2. The collection is low-burden for respondents and low-cost for the Federal Government.

3. The collection is non-controversial and does not raise issues of concern to other federal agencies.

4. The primary purpose of the results is not for public dissemination.

5. Information gathered will not be used for the purpose of substantially informing influential policy decisions.

6. The collection is targeted to the solicitation of opinions from respondents who have experience with the program or may have experience with the program in the future.

Name and affiliation: Alysia Blandon, Senior Social Science Research Analyst: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation.

To assist review, please provide answers to the following questions:

Personally Identifiable Information:

1. Is personally identifiable information (PII) collected? [ X ] Yes [ ] No

2. If Yes, will any information that is collected be included in records that are subject to the Privacy Act of 1974? [ ] Yes [ X ] No

3. If Yes, has an up-to-date System of Records Notice (SORN) been published? [ ] Yes [ ] No

Gifts or Payments:

Is an incentive (e.g., money or reimbursement of expenses, token of appreciation) provided to participants? [ X ] Yes [ ] No

Participants will be made up of parents of young children. As such, we propose to provide participants with a $50 Amazon electronic gift card as a token of appreciation. This token is intended to offset costs of participation in the study, such as child care or other expenses and to help ensure that individuals with more constraints on their ability to participate may take part. Without a token, we risk not collecting perspectives from parents who may have less available time, such as parents with multiple children and in households where all resident adults are working. Having a broad set of perspectives from our cognitive interview respondents is a primary indication of high quality in these cognitive interviews. Having these broad perspectives will help us design the main survey questionnaire so that it better captures information from the full spectrum of households with young children, thus improving the representativeness (and data quality) of the main survey.

BURDEN HOURS

Information Collection	Category of Respondent	No. of Respondents	No. of Responses per Respondent	Estimated Time per Response	Burden Hours
Survey on where Parents Look for and Find Information when Selecting Child Care	Individuals 18 or over with young children	20	1	75 minutes	25 hours

FEDERAL COST: The estimated total cost to the Federal government is $20,535.

If you are conducting a focus group, survey, or plan to employ statistical methods, please provide answers to the following questions:

The selection of your targeted respondents

1. Do you have a customer list or something similar that defines the universe of potential respondents and do you have a sampling plan for selecting from this universe? [ X] Yes [ ] No

If the answer is yes, please provide a description of both below (or attach the sampling plan)? If the answer is no, please provide a description of how you plan to identify your potential group of respondents and how you will select them?

The selection of targeted respondents will come from a parent advisory group from Child Care Aware of America (CCAoA). CCAoA will randomly select respondents from their listservs to invite to participate in cognitive testing of the questionnaire. We will also use our internal networks and our partners at the Urban Institute to recruit the targeted respondents as needed. We will use our internal networks to increase demographic diversity as needed. Our internal networks include individuals from several locations throughout the U.S. and skew toward lower-income and less-skilled workers, who may be harder to recruit in other contexts but are important to the study priorities.

Administration of the Instrument

1. How will you collect the information? (Check all that apply)

[ ] Web-based or other forms of Social Media

[ ] Telephone

[ ] In-person

[ ] Mail

[ X ] Other, Explain

We will administer the cognitive interviews via a virtual platform. During the session respondents will complete segments of the parent questionnaire, followed by a series of questions about their understanding of the survey items.

2. Will interviewers or facilitators be used? [ X ] Yes [ ] No

Please make sure that all instruments, instructions, and scripts are submitted with the request.

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