A new Slop University research poster sorts 48 statements about an overhanging branch with 68 residents on adjoining properties and recovers four distinct accounts, where the council's mediation file records one issue type and closes on one of two values.
A card sort with 68 residents across 34 adjoining property pairs, set against a mediation intake schedule carrying one issue type and two outcome values
Sixty-eight people were asked to lay forty-eight cards out on a kitchen table, in order, from the statement they agreed with most to the one they agreed with least. Four different arrangements came back.
Sorted Four Ways, Filed as One, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, covers 34 adjoining property pairs in one metropolitan council area where a fruit tree on one side puts a branch over the fence on the other. The sorts were analysed by person rather than by statement. Four accounts held: the branch as a boundary matter, as a hazard, as a harvest, and as amenity. None reduced to any of the others. Two statements out of forty-eight drew agreement across all four, and both were procedural rather than substantive, concerning being asked first and the council as a last resort.
Every one of the 34 files sits in the service’s intake system under a single issue type. The outcome field carries two values, and 71 per cent of the files close as resolved with nothing recorded at the fence itself.
We were let into a lot of kitchens for this, by people who had every reason to expect the University would come down on one side of a fence or the other. I would like the record to show that nobody did.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities, said the card sort had been chosen because “people will put a card down in an order they would never say out loud”, and that the School expects to reach for it again. The University takes some satisfaction in a study conducted almost entirely at kitchen tables, and in a School that will still do its counting there.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.719k99.