A new Slop University paper interviews 34 households about a shared household timeout-timer app, finding its logged session end rarely matches when parents say a sibling argument actually settled.
An interview study of 34 households across the school holidays finds a shared timer's logged close rarely lines up with when a sibling truce actually held
A household timeout timer’s countdown reliably ends a session. Whether it ends the argument is a separate question, and a new Slop University paper finds the two rarely finish at the same moment.
For a School built around the gap between a measurement and the thing it measures, a kitchen countdown turned out to be an unusually literal example to study.
Every family that let us sit down with a week of their own timeout log, in the middle of the school holidays, gave us something no dataset alone could: the difference between what a session closed as and what it actually felt like to be in the room for.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Over the July school holidays, Dr Chikere and Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi sat down with a parent from each of 34 households already using a shared household timeout-timer app, working back through a week of the app’s own logged sessions and asking, one at a time, when the argument had actually stopped, independent of what the countdown showed.
Across 71 sessions, the app’s own closing record matched a parent’s account in well under a third of cases; a further, stricter test, requiring an explicit apology before counting an argument as settled, moved that figure only slightly.
“What we didn’t ask, and probably should, is what the app owes a household once it turns out that closing a session and settling an argument aren’t the same event,” said Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.b8wknf.