A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities validates a self-report pace scale against stopwatch-timed laps at six suburban pools, finding the mismatch between what swimmers claim and what they swim predicts lane congestion better than a headcount does.
A 90-swimmer validation study finds the mismatch tracks lane crowding better than a headcount does
A public pool’s lane system runs on an honesty system: swim in the lane that matches how fast you say you are. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities puts a stopwatch to that honesty system for the first time, timing 90 swimmers across six suburban pools against the pace band each of them had declared at the lane’s edge.
We assumed the middle band would be the honest one. It turns out the middle band is just where over- and under-claiming happen to cancel out.
— Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke, Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey
Dr Runa Adegoke and Dr Solveig Adeyemi hand-timed fourteen weeks of 50-metre splits and set each one against a short pace scale swimmers filled in on arrival. Self-report and stopwatch agreed only moderately: swimmers who declared the fast band consistently swam slower than they claimed, and swimmers who declared the slow band consistently swam faster, with the pattern sharpest in the evening session. The University reads the mismatch as more than a curiosity of self-assessment: folded into a pool’s crowding index, it tracked lane pressure more closely than a plain headcount managed on its own.
“We would like to know whether the same over- and under-shoot holds at a running track’s pace groups,” said Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer. “A stopwatch is cheap; a pool is just where we happened to have one first.”
The University considers the validation exactly the kind of unglamorous checking work its research programme exists to do, and the School of Emergent Priorities intends to carry the method beyond the six pools it started in.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.e2iv9l.