Amendment to the Employee Wellness Surveys and Pulse Check Surveys PIA - Supplemental Assessment of the Hard-to-Reach Populations Internal Pilot

Introduction

This is a Supplemental assessment related to the activities originally assessed in the Employee Wellness Surveys and Pulse Check Surveys (EWS) Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA).

Objective

A privacy impact assessment for the Hard-to-Reach Populations Internal Pilot was conducted to determine if there were any privacy, confidentiality or security issues with this activity and, if so, to make recommendations for their resolution or mitigation.

Description

Statistics Canada's Hard-to-Reach Populations (H2RP) internal pilot component of the EWS aims to gain insight into the factors that contributed to nonresponse by employees who could have participated in the November and December 2021 collection of the EWS, but who chose not to do so. The EWS program is comprised of a main survey and series of pulse check surveys administered to the employees of StatCan, all conducted under the Financial Administration Act (FAA). It was conceived to help assess and improve employee wellness across the agency, but the recent survey only achieved an estimated 56% response rate. The H2RP internal pilot will follow-up with a small sample of the EWS nonrespondents using a respondent-driven sampling (RDS) methodology in order to reach employees who are reluctant, or who do not tend, to respond to more-traditional survey approaches. Short personal interviews will be conducted by the Consultative Engagement (CE) team from Stakeholder Relations and Engagement. Participants will be encouraged and told how to recruit more participants from amongst their peers, who will in turn contact the CE team in order to schedule an appointment for an interview to be conducted.

The pilot addresses an HR business need (program-related policy updates to motivate nonrespondents - in this case, employees - to respond to future surveys) by using respondent-driven sampling to reach and convince EWS nonrespondents to participate.

To address the new focus, the following activities will be carried out:

1. Hard-to-Reach Populations pilot
   The pilot targets nonrespondents from the EWS. Each participant will complete a short 15-minute personal interview before being provided with a "coupon-code" and asked to pass it on to three of their colleagues. In turn, those secondary (recruited) individuals will also be asked to do the same until the respondent-driven sampling activity concludes. The follow-up study targets 300 participants over six to eight waves with the expectation that the realized sample reaches a point of pseudo-randomness. In addition to the content related specifically to nonresponse, the study questionnaire will collect demographic information, a self-assessment by participants of how many peers are in their "personal network", and a number of wellness indicators (as asked in the EWS). The demographic and held-over wellness items will be used, respectively, to assess the realized sample's randomness and to gauge the relationship between the EWS survey topic and nonresponse.
2. EWS follow-up and use of results
   Through the follow-up questionnaire, the business needs as they pertain to survey nonresponse will be investigated. These business needs target barriers to and facilitators of survey response that may, respectively, hinder or enhance employees' willingness to participate in future survey-based research (e.g., the second iteration of the EWS or other internal surveys).
   The business needs to be addressed are related to identifying factors that are psychosocial in nature (e.g., workload, burn-out) and those that are not (e.g., inadequate explanation of the purpose of the survey, benefits of completing the survey). As such, personal interviews will include questions aimed at investigating various barriers and facilitators which nonrespondents may have encountered, and contributed to their nonresponse to the original survey. Additionally, a limited subset of questions from the original EWS have been included which may be considered psychosocial barriers or facilitators.
   In order to address these business needs, de-identified microdata from the pilot will be used to conduct statistical analyses of differences between responses from participants in the pilot study and previously collected information from respondents to the EWS. Any disaggregation of data will only be considered if the subsamples of interest (e.g., gender) are large enough to mitigate any potential privacy concerns and are amenable to statistical analysis.
   Only aggregate statistical outputs conforming to the confidentiality provisions of what would have been required if the information had been collected under the Statistics Act will be considered for release. Research findings, if disseminated outside of the project team, would be through peer-reviewed academic publications.

Risk Area Identification and Categorization

The PIA identifies the level of potential risk (level 1 is the lowest level of potential risk and level 4 is the highest) associated with the following risk areas:

Conclusion

This assessment of the Supplemental Assessment of Hard-to-Reach Populations Internal Pilot
did not identify any privacy risks that cannot be managed using existing safeguards.