A School of Continuous Improvement poster sets a confidential fortnightly need diary against the campus food pantry's visit log, and finds the count the Living Dashboard reads as a hardship signal is bounded by the pantry's own one-visit ration.
A diary study of 64 pantry users finds self-reported need climbing while recorded visits stay pinned at the fortnightly cap
A student who needs the campus food pantry twice in a fortnight may visit it once. The Living Dashboard, which reads those visits as a leading indicator of financial hardship, records the one.
A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, presented this week by the Office of Research Outputs, asks what that count is able to see. Dr Mirela Hanke and Associate Professor Casimir Beng asked 64 pantry users to keep a confidential fortnightly record of their own need, uncapped and held apart from the ration, and matched each entry to the same person’s official visit log across eight fortnights. Eighteen sat for exit interviews on what a visit had come to mean once their allocation was spent.
The diary index climbed 2.5× over the term. Recorded visits did not move, holding within 0.84 to 0.98 of the single visit the pantry allows, and the two series agreed only weakly (r = 0.34). Agreement was thinnest among the participants who exhausted a fortnight’s allocation in its first two days.
Sixty-four people kept a private account of a difficult fortnight, every fortnight, for a term, and handed it to us. What the University owes them back is precision about what its own record was never built to hold.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement
The University maintains that a measure standing between a student and the help available to them should be asked, from time to time, what it is capable of registering.
“A count that cannot rise above one is not counting need above one,” said Associate Professor Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “Whether the Dashboard should carry a figure the ration has already settled is a question the Lab now has to put to itself.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.y1dp98.