Socio-Economic Survey of Hired Captains and Crew in New England and Mid-Atlantic Commercial Fisheries

The Northeast Fisheries Science Center's Social Sciences Branch (SSB) completed the second wave of a survey of crew, including hired captains, participating in commercial fisheries in the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions. This survey is a follow-up to the baseline survey wave collected in 2012-2013. During late 2018 and early 2019, NEFSC staff conducted interviews with commercial fishing vessel crew and hired captains at ports from Maine to North Carolina. Interviewers asked respondents questions regarding their demographic background, the availability of work, and fishing trip characteristics, among other topics of interest related to employment in commercial fishing.

The purpose of this survey is to provide for the ongoing collection of socioeconomic data for regulatory analysis related to fisheries and their communities in the Northeast Region of the United States. NMFS needs the socioeconomic data included in this information collection to be capable of more than cursory efforts to comply with or support the laws, Executive Orders (EOs) and NOAA Fisheries strategies and policies, which require socioeconomic data and analyses.

face to face interviews

Responses to the survey are completely voluntary and completely confidential. Responses were not collected for any enforcement related purposes.

No individual owner’s responses will be associated with his or her name or vessel information.NOAA Fisheries, including the SSB, will not know what fishermen are returning the survey or what a specific fisherman’s responses are.

Responses to this information request are confidential under section 402(b) of the Magnuson-Stevens Act as amended in 2006. Responses are also confidential under NOAA Administrative Order 216-100, which sets forth procedures to protect confidentiality of fishery statistics. Notwithstanding any other provisions of the law, no person is required to respond to, nor shall any person be subjected to a penalty for failure to comply with, a collection of information subject to the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act, unless that collection of information displays a currently valid OMB Control Number

NEFSC Data Access Procedure:

1. Formal request in writing usually to the data owner/contact or Center Director;

2. Requester is contacted by data owner to review and verify the request content and details for data delivery options.

3. If data is confidential then owner will determine if the data may be released to the requester;

4. If data can be released, the data is downloaded and packaged for delivery electronically; or the requester may be directed to where the data is available online.

NEFSC Data Access Constraint:

If data is stored on an internal NEFSC network, the requester may not have direct access to query the data unless they are also authorized for network access.

Data entry and quality control were conducted by a contractor and reviewed by federal employee data steward

Archival of source data preserving unaltered collected data, Scheduled backups, Remote storage backups, Password protection

face to face interviews were conducted by a federal employee and two contractors who were responsible for providing a clean data set