A new Slop University research poster interviews 41 people across nine junior sporting clubs and reads their fee schedules, rosters and budget papers, finding 46 per cent of the season's canteen hours worked by eleven households and no club keeping a count of the shifts nobody took.
A study of canteen rostering across one junior sporting association finds the charge for an unworked shift forecast a season ahead
A junior sporting club’s volunteer levy is written down twice. In the fee schedule it is an encouragement to take a canteen shift. In the budget papers, at eight of the nine clubs studied, it is a line of income with a figure against it for the season ahead.
A research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities sets those two documents beside each other, and beside 41 interviews with the parents, coordinators, treasurers and coaches who between them keep nine canteens open through a winter.
We set out to describe how a roster gets filled, and spent most of the season discovering that the School had been reading the wrong document. The roster is not a record of the work. It is the surface the charge is calculated on.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies
Interviews were transcribed and coded twice against a framework closed before the second pass, then set against every fee schedule, roster and budget paper the nine clubs would release. Hours actually worked were reconstructed from sign-on sheets rather than from the roster. Eleven households turn out to have worked 46 per cent of them.
No club in the study keeps a count of the shifts that went unworked. All nine keep a count of the levies paid.
“There is a version of the roster that would settle the question, and it would cost a club its most predictable line of income,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee.
Work at this scale — one association, one season, one serving hatch — is what Slop University has lately taken to calling its schools at their most legible, and the poster is published in that spirit.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.z2lt4c.