01-30761. Agency Forms Undergoing Paperwork Reduction Act Review

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes a list of information collection requests under review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act (44 U.S.C. chapter 35). To request a copy of these requests, call the CDC Reports Clearance Officer at [phone]. Send written comments to CDC, Desk Officer, Human Resources and Housing Branch, New Executive Office Building, Room 10235, Washington, DC 20503. Written comments should be received within 30 days of this notice.

Proposed Project: NIOSH Website for Kids and Teens—New—The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The mission of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is to promote safety and health at work for all people through research and prevention.

The goal of this project is to develop a more effective means of communicating NIOSH occupational safety and health (OSH) information to youth via the NIOSH Website for Kids and Teens. NIOSH research indicates that approximately 80% of youths are employed at some point before they leave high school. Research also indicates that despite being prevented by child labor laws from engaging in the most dangerous occupations, teens have a higher rate of injury per hour worked than adults. Each year, 70 teens die from work injuries. Another 200,000 are injured on the job each year. Of these, about 100,000 are injured seriously enough to require emergency room treatment.

This project will identify effective promotional methods to assure a high level of awareness of the NIOSH Website for Kids and Teens among youth and to generate a high volume of first-time visitors to the website. This project will also develop enhanced website content to increase the relevance of the NIOSH Website for Kids and Teens for the youth audience and to insure repeated visits to the website. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) will be used to guide the assessment of youth attitudes and intentions regarding the usage of an OSH website. This information will be used to tailor promotional messages to increase their appeal to youth who report that they would not be likely to visit an OSH website. The effectiveness of the tailored promotional messages will be contrasted with that of untailored messages.

Due to significant differences in cognitive and emotional development, the youth audience targeted by this study will be segmented into three age groups, 5-8, 9-14, and 15-19. These age groups roughly correspond to elementary, middle, and high school. Different website content will be developed for each age group.

Since youth from rural and urban backgrounds have different opportunities for employment, it is expected that youth from these two areas will have different OSH information needs. This study will recruit representative samples of youth from both rural and urban areas. Differences found between youth from these two areas will be used to tailor website content for each group. The impact of this tailoring will be assessed by systematically matching and mismatching this tailored content with representative samples of youth from each area.

The aims of this project will be accomplished in three phases: (1) Representative samples from each of three targeted age groups (5-8, 9-14, 15-19) will be surveyed regarding their preferences for website content, style, promotional channels, behavioral intentions, behavioral norms, and perceived behavioral constraints; (2) Pretesting of enhanced OSH website content and format developed by this study on representative samples of the targeted age groups and of promotional materials; (3) A promotional campaign using a 3 (elementary, middle, and high school age groups) × 2 (tailored promotional messages, untailored promotional messages) × 2 (rural, urban) design. Promotional messages will be placed in venues (such as magazines or television programs) that have youth oriented content. The effectiveness of these promotional channels and messages will be determined by monitoring the volume of visits to the respective internet portal pages for the NIOSH Website for Kids and Teens. The total estimated burden is 3,000 hours.

Type of survey	Type of respondents	Number of respondents	Number of responses/respondent	Avg. burden/response (in hrs.)
Audience Need Preference Survey	Elementary, and middle, and high school students	750	1	2
Pretesting	Elementary, middle, and high school students	750	1	2

Dated: December 5, 2001.

Nancy E. Cheal,

Acting Associate Director for Policy, Planning and Evaluation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.