NonSub Change - Survey Staff Recruitment, Training, and PD in EHS

To: Kelsi Feltz

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)

Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

From: Jenessa Malin & Krystal Bichay-Awadalla

Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE)

Administration for Children and Families (ACF)

Date: May 28, 2024

Subject: NonSubstantive Change Request – Survey of Staff Recruitment, Training, and Professional Development in Early Head Start (OMB #0970-0629)

This memo requests approval of nonsubstantive changes to the approved information collection, Survey of Staff Recruitment, Training, and Professional Development in Early Head Start (OMB #0970-0629).

Background

On March 26^th, 2024, OMB approved the information collection request to: (1) collect survey data from up to 600 Early Head Start programs representative of the population of Early Head Start programs in the continental United States; and (2) recruit Early Head Start program directors, or another program staff to answer the survey about (a) their program’s staff recruitment, training, and professional development strategies; (b) their programs’ successes and challenges with those strategies for hiring and maintaining staff with the qualifications and competencies to serve infants, toddlers, and pregnant women.

The study team started collecting data in April of 2024 and preliminary analysis of our data showed that there was a survey logic error that made 43 of respondents skip over a subset of follow-up questions from instruments 1, 2, and 3. It is important that our team collects complete information from most participants to ensure representativeness of the Early Head Start program population. Finding this error highlighted a need for our team to be able to follow-up with certain participants about this specific question and other issues that might arise as we perform quality assurance checks of the data.

Overview of Requested Changes

We propose to conduct outreach to respondents who: (1) did not see all the questions to ask them to complete the missing questions; or (2) provided answers that are confusing based on answers to other questions or are out of the expected range.

1. Request to follow up with the 53 respondents whose survey did not include the few questions about organizations their program partners with to support their recruitment efforts. Our team proposes to send an email to the 53 respondents who completed the survey but missed the subset of questions. Our team requests approval to follow-up with the 53 respondents to ask them to complete subset of questions. To minimize further program burden and disruptions, our team plans to create a separate survey with only the questions that our team would like the respondent to answer or confirm their original answer. We estimate a maximum burden of 5 minutes per respondent (see Supporting Statement A). Once data collection is complete, we plan to impute any remaining missing responses and to use data cleaning techniques to manage outliers and implausible data (see Supporting Statement B).

2. Request to follow up with survey respondents to ask about inconsistent responses or answers outside the expected range. Our team plans to send one follow-up email and reminder to respondents who completed the survey and our team would like to follow-up with them on a subset of questions. If the email address our team had on file is no longer working, our team plans to reach out to the program using the program phone number from the Program Information Report. The proposed scripts for these outreaches can be found in Appendix E. Our team plans to only ask programs to complete previously approved survey items (see Instruments 1, 2, and 3).

Time Sensitivities

Our team would like to reach out to programs who completed their surveys as soon as possible. While there is no strict deadline, sending a follow-up soon will optimize our team’s ability to successfully reach programs and will help respondents recall their other survey responses. Furthermore, a quick follow up will ensure that the additional information the respondent provides is not based on a different timeframe than their responses to other survey questions.