Addendum to Supporting Statement 0960-0840

Addendum to the Supporting Statement for

Supportive Housing & Individual Placement and Support (SHIPS) Study

ICR Reference Number: 202404-0960-015

OMB No. 0960-0840

Background

SSA is making several changes to the “Quarterly Work & Housing Interview” data instrument that we previously submitted and which OMB previously approved as part of the Supportive Housing & Individual Placement and Support (SHIPS) Study information collection package. SSA awarded Westat a cooperative agreement to conduct the SHIPS study, and Westat requested these changes following OMB’s approval of the initial SHIPS information collection package.

We are making these change to collect information about employment services directly from SHIPS participants. Westat previously understood from discussions with a crucial subcontractor on this project (People Supporting the Homeless [PATH]) that case managers would collect the data and the data would be made available to Westat through the sharing of administrative data. As Westat was finalizing its subcontract agreement with PATH, PATH management notified Westat that case managers could not collect information and store the information in a reliable data system. SSA agrees with Westat that the best corrective action in light of this new information is to amend this quarterly interview to include questions about the employment services that participants have received in the past three months and remove an associated question block so that it takes no more time to answer the revised set of questions than it did the approved set of questions.

Revision to the Quarterly Work & Housing Interview Instrument

SSA is making the following revision:

Quarterly Work & Housing Interview Instrument

• Change #1: We are adding REDCap Username metadata field to the page, and are removing the metadata field What is the interview period.

Justification #1: We are making the changes to the metadata fields for the researchers to complete without asking any questions from the SHIPS participants

• Change #2: We are adding three question prompts to the “Employment” section of the “Quarterly Work & Housing Interview” data instrument:

(1) “In the past three months, what employment services have you participated in?”:

(2) “You indicated that you participated in employment services other than Worksource Centers, Individual Placement and Support, or Chrysalis. What service or services did you participate in?”; and

(3) How many times did you meet with a provider of the employment services in which you participated?” The first and third of these questions include multiple-choice answers to support recall and ease of answering, and the second question is a free-form answer that is only asked if the answer to first question is not included in a list of several options.

Justification #2: Westat developed the quarterly interview data instrument that SSA included in the previously approved OMB information collection package to collect information needed for this study that was not already being collected by a crucial subcontractor on this project, PATH. Data that PATH had intended to collect included a participation measure for participation in Worksource Center Services (WCS), the typical referral source for employment services that case managers referred PATH residents seeking employment. Measuring participation in WCS for PATH participants is crucial to this study because SHIPS is a study specifically designed to assess the impact of an alternative supported employment approach, Individual Placement and Support (IPS), compared to WCS.

• Change #3: We are revising the introductory language on page #3 under the Employment section:

Current language: Employment. We will now ask you about any jobs you held in the past three months

Revised language: Employment. “We will now ask you about employment services and any jobs you held in the past three months.”

Justification #3: We are revising the language to include questions about employment services.

• Change #4: We are removing the question on page #4 “If you stayed in more than one place, where did you stay the most?”

Justification #4: We are removing the question, because Westat determined this question has limited usefulness for this study.

• Change #5: We are revising the language on page #3 under the Current Housing, 3^rd question

Current Language:

Please indicate any other place you have slept for at least one night during the p past three months:

• My own apartment or home

• Someone else's apartment or home

• In a shelter, emergency, temporary housing

• Hotel/motel provided by an agency

• Outside on the street, park, or beach

• Tent or makeshift shelter

• In a bus station, train station, airport

• Abandoned building

Revised Language:

Please indicate any other place you have slept for at least one night during the p past three months:

• Someone else's apartment or home

• In a shelter, emergency, temporary housing

• Hotel/motel provided by an agency

• Outside on the street, park, or beach

• Tent or makeshift shelter

• In a bus station, train station, airport

• Abandoned building

Justification #5: We are removing the option “my own apartment or home.” To reduce the potential burden faced by respondents in attempting to seek clarification on confusing or nonsensical answer options.

ICAP SHIPS Consent form

• Change #6: We are revising the consent form to remove the word “gender” from the form.

Justification #6: We are removing the word gender to be align with the current Administration’s policy.

We will implement this change upon OMB’s approval. This revision does not affect the public reporting burden for this application.

Justification for Resubmission of the Collection within One Year of OMB Approval

We are requesting the collection within a year of the OMB approval date. Westat was unable to make these changes prior to the previous submission of the clearance package ,because we had reason to believe that another entity (PATH) would be collecting data by administrative data collection and that such information would be shared with Westat as part of the terms of their subcontract. It was only in discussions leading up to the implementation – following OMB approval of the SHIPS information collection package where PATH informed Westat this type of data collection and data sharing was not viable. All of the above changes except Change #4 resulted from this development, which was not foreseeable prior to the submission of the initial OMB package.

We are requesting these changes now instead of waiting until the collection is up for renewal because enrollment for the SHIPS project is already underway, and we expect the implementation of the SHIPS intervention to last for only two years. As the above information is crucial for evaluating the SHIPS study, we want to make sure that we are collecting it consistently and reliably for as many participants as possible and for as many quarters of involvement as possible for these participants.