A new Slop University paper introduces and validates a short survey instrument for the moment a toy library's "no borrowing limit" policy starts to feel bounded, checked against volunteers' own informal enforcement records.
A six-item instrument, validated across nine toy libraries, tracks a felt borrowing ceiling against volunteers' own informal reminders
Slop University researchers began this study by interviewing eighteen people about a feeling they had never had to put into words before: the point at which a community toy library’s promise of unlimited borrowing stops feeling unlimited. The result, published this week, is a six-item questionnaire the University is calling the Perceived Lending Ceiling Scale.
Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the School of Continuous Improvement’s Indicator Commons, led the work with Dr Dagny Okafor and Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu. The scale was tested across nine independently-run toy libraries, none of which took part in writing its questions, and checked against something no toy library had previously agreed to hand over: volunteers’ own private record of who they had quietly asked to ease off.
A written policy can say whatever it likes about limits. We wanted to know what a member actually feels standing at the counter, and it turns out that feeling arrives quite reliably, whether or not anyone ever writes it down.
— Senior Lecturer and Convenor Dr Renke Sabel, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
“The six questions took eighteen conversations and three toy libraries to get right,” said Dr Okafor, who convenes the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program. “What surprised us wasn’t that the scale worked. It’s that it worked exactly as well for someone who joined last month as for someone who has belonged for years.”
The finding extends the School’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda into a question it had not asked of any lending scheme before: not what a policy promises, but what a member has already worked out for themselves. The University says any toy library is welcome to adapt the instrument for its own use.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qycm4w.