A new Slop University paper builds a five-category taxonomy of a childcare network's incident-note log and links it to rostering and follow-up-action records, finding no category predicts what the next shift does differently.
A five-category taxonomy of a childcare network's incident-note log tracks its own text well but not what the next shift does about it
We didn’t set out to ask whether a taxonomy needs to matter to be worth keeping. We’re glad the log is making us ask it anyway.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
A new Slop University paper from the School of Continuous Improvement sorts a childcare network’s daily incident-note log into five categories — and finds the sorting predicts almost nothing about what happens next.
Dr Adeyemi, working with Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel and Lecturer Marit Osayande, coded nine months of entries from an eleven-centre network’s incident-note app, building a taxonomy that held up well against a second coder’s independent read. They then set the taxonomy against records the network already keeps for other reasons — its rostering system and its follow-up-action log — rather than against what staff said they did.
Across more than fourteen thousand entries, roughly a third were followed by some logged next-shift action, and that share barely moved from one taxonomy category to the next. Stripping the entry’s length out of the sorting procedure made no difference either.
“The categories are good at describing the log,” said Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement. “We’re less sure yet what they’re good at describing to anyone reading it.”
The School reads the result as consistent with a wider caution it has voiced before about instruments that sort cleanly without anyone asking whether the sorting changes anything downstream.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mg9ifb.