A Quick Visit Scores Best asks 1,036 residents to choose between hypothetical mobile library timetables, and finds that the loans-per-van-hour figure a council ranks its 41 kerbside stops on rewards the visits that finish quickest.
A choice experiment with 1,036 residents finds the stop ranking a council route review is built on close to unrelated to the one residents' own preferences imply.
The School of Continuous Improvement has spent several years on the question of what happens when the only number a service can easily produce becomes the number it is judged by. Its newest paper takes that question to a van parked at a kerb.
A Quick Visit Scores Best, published today, reports a discrete-choice experiment run with 1,036 residents living within a short walk of a stop on one council’s four mobile library routes. Each was asked to choose, twelve times over, between two hypothetical timetables for their own stop. Dr Sten Okwuosa, Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Torun Ezeigwe report that residents would accept 11.3 minutes of extra walking for an after-work arrival and 12.6 for a Saturday morning one, but 2.1 for a van that stays three times as long.
The council ranks its 41 stops on loans per hour of van time. Ranking the same stops by what the experiment predicts residents would choose produces an order whose correlation with the productivity figure is 0.14. Six of the ten stops flagged for withdrawal sit in the upper half of the preference-based order.
We set out to describe a timetable and ended up describing ourselves. This School is very good at building a number when one is wanted, and this is a useful reminder of how rarely anybody is asked whether it was the number they meant.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
The study pairs the stated-preference work with twelve months of the service’s own circulation records, which show a reserved-hold collection taking under a minute at the counter against nearly ten for a visit spent browsing. “Both of those are a loan,” said Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement. “Only one of them is quick, and the ranking can only see the difference between them.”
The University regards the paper as a consolidation of a research posture it has been assembling across public services: an interest in the point at which a convenient measure hardens into a description of the thing measured.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9xmvu7.