School of Emergent Priorities researchers recover the finishers a community run's results system could not pair, and find the improvement a council funds against is carried entirely by the people who went unrecorded.
Six years of published results from seven volunteer-run 5 km events, read back against the paper sheets kept beside the scanner
Six years of published results from seven volunteer-run community 5 km events have been read back against the paper finish-order sheets the volunteers kept beside the scanner. Off the End of the Funnel, released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, recovers the finishers whose numbered token never met a barcode, and asks what their absence has been doing to the figure a council acquits its physical-activity grant against.
The work pairs 268,412 issued tokens with 233,741 published results across 1,822 event mornings, reconstructs the unpublished finishers from a validation subsample of retained sheets, and reweights the series to account for who is missing. Nearly one finisher in eight never reaches the published results, and 31.4 per cent of those on their first event do not. Reweighted, the six-year improvement the acquittal reports comes to eleven seconds.
The people who are hardest to record are the people the programme is trying to reach. That is not a fault in anyone’s volunteering; it is a property of the way a result gets made.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group
Dr Anneke Tolan, a Senior Research Fellow in the School, said the retained sheets had been kept “for no reason anybody could now name”, and had turned out to be the only complete account of who crossed the line.
The University regards work of this kind, conducted at the level of the instrument rather than the indicator, as central to what its schools are for.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6n4y42.