School of Continuous Improvement researchers recover eleven years of a state scouting association's membership returns as published, and find that reconstructing them on a single counting rule turns a flat series into a 27.2 per cent fall.
Eleven annual returns re-derived on the rule in force in 2015, and the 1,320 members the revisions carry
To read eleven annual reports as one series, someone first has to read eleven sets of instructions. Stable on Four Definitions, released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, does that for a state scouting association’s youth-membership return, and reports that the instructions moved further than the membership did.
The team recovered each year’s report as it was published, coded the census rule in force beside it, and re-derived every return from group-level census sheets on the rule that applied in 2015. The published series falls 1.5 per cent across eleven years; the reconstructed one falls 27.2 per cent, from 5,140 to 3,742. Four revisions carry the 1,320-member difference between them: a widened census window, a new entry-programme category, a longer lapse window, and a carry-over for the members of amalgamated groups.
Each of these revisions was disclosed in the year it was made, in a footnote nobody was hiding. What no report has ever done is redraw the line behind it, and eleven years on that is the whole of the difference.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds, described the association’s own governance as “entirely orderly about it”, adding that “a footnote is a disclosure and a chart is a claim, and the two have had a decade to drift apart”.
The work was supported under the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund. The University takes it as evidence that its measurement agenda travels into the volunteer sector, where the record-keeping is careful and the continuity of a series is nobody’s particular job.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mrogx7.