A new Slop University research poster tests what drivers can state about the day's fire danger rating shortly after passing a roadside sign, and finds recall flat above the first sign on a route while the district's awareness indicator keeps climbing.
1,180 roadside interviews across 34 rural routes put correct recall at 62.8 per cent after one sign passed and 63.6 per cent after three or more
Every fire danger sign in the district is on a list, and the length of that list is the district’s community-awareness figure. Nothing on it records whether anybody read one.
The Second Sign Buys Nothing, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, put the question to 1,180 drivers stopped at rest areas and fuel stops along 34 rural routes across eleven weeks of one declared fire season. Whether a respondent had passed a sign, and how many, came from the road authority’s asset register rather than from the driver. The scoring rule and the analysis were lodged before the first interview.
Correct recall stands at 21.4 per cent among drivers who have passed no sign and 62.8 per cent among those who have passed one. Above one it stops moving: 63.6 per cent at three, 63.9 per cent at five. The figure the district reports counts signs per hundred kilometres of road, and rises the whole way.
The result is not that the signs do nothing. The first one does almost everything that is available to be done. What we have not been able to find is the reader the second sign was bought for.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer in the School, located the interest in the measure’s construction rather than in its result. “The denominator was the part nobody had looked at,” she said. “Road length is easy to know, and it is not who lives there.”
The work was supported by the Anticipatory Capability Fund. The University counts the exercise as one of its schools reading an indicator back to the body that keeps it, and expects the method to travel.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ntcw6j.