School of Emergent Priorities researchers play four district siren signals to 384 residents and find the weekly noon test is named correctly nine times in ten, while the emergency alert and the all clear are not reliably told apart.
Three hundred and eighty-four residents across eleven district towns, played the four tones their siren system carries and asked to name each one
What a preparedness return counts as community education and what a community has actually learned are, on the evidence of a study released today, two different lists. Correct at Noon, from the School of Emergent Priorities, played 384 residents across eleven district towns the four signals their local siren system carries and asked them to name each one.
A signal that only ever sounds when nothing is wrong is still teaching people something. Our interest is in what a town has been taught, and in the return that records the lesson as delivered.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The team ran nine weeks of hall sessions and street stalls, presenting standardised recordings in randomised order at a fixed level and taking a forced choice from five labels lifted word for word from the district’s own community education leaflet. The weekly noon test was named correctly by 91.4 per cent of respondents. The emergency alert managed 37.8 per cent, the all clear 30.6, and the call that turns out the volunteer brigade 22.7. Alert and all clear were not reliably separated at all.
“Length of residence helps with exactly one of the four,” said Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey. “That is the finding we would want a district to sit with before it schedules more of what it is already doing.”
For the School, the work extends its longer effort to put a figure on the distance between what an institution records itself as doing and what that doing achieves, and a comparison across towns that sound the test at different hours is already scoped.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xhc4gw.