A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement sets the fire-safety walk-through's compliance count against a term-long survey of propping habits, and finds the two describe different practices, not competing measurements of one.
An anonymous survey finds most staff and students have propped a stairwell fire door open, against a walk-through that logs the same doors closed 97% of the time
Slop University’s fire-safety walk-through has recorded stairwell doors closed on 97% of its scheduled passes for the past year. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement sets that figure against a different one: an anonymous survey of 438 staff and students across the same eleven buildings finds three in five report propping a stairwell fire door open at least once in the past month, most often with a folded document, a shoe, or the corridor’s own fire extinguisher.
A walk-through announced a week ahead of itself is not really testing the door. It is testing whether the building can look its best when it knows someone is coming, and it turns out that it can.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation
The study is the kind of small, unglamorous audit the School of Continuous Improvement was built to run, setting an official compliance record against what a self-report instrument sees on the days nobody is carrying a clipboard. The team split the survey into an anonymous condition and a signed one to check the high propping-admission rate wasn’t simply people feeling safer confessing under cover; the two conditions returned almost the same figure. Dr Bram Ntuli, the paper’s second author, said the result “says less about any one propped door than about what a compliance instrument can and cannot see once its own inspection schedule becomes public knowledge.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5uwpmh.