School of Continuous Improvement researchers put the condition grades used in second-hand listings to a three-round expert panel, and found consensus on the evidence a seller must supply but none on where one grade ends and the next begins.
Three rounds with 41 moderators, dealers and valuers, and a condition schedule ratified with its four grades as the panel left them
A condition schedule now attached to second-hand listings carries four grades that its own expert panel could not agree on. How Used Is “Barely Used”?, released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, reports the three rounds that tried.
Forty-one panellists, drawn from group moderators, second-hand dealers and valuers, rated photographs of items as they had been posted, then re-rated them against the anonymised distribution of the panel’s own answers. Twenty-four items went into the first round and eight were carried to the third, with every panellist still in place at the end. Each item specifying what a seller must show cleared the agreement threshold the team registered before the panel convened. No item asking where one grade ends and the next begins came near it.
Three rounds taught us more about the panel than about the grades. That is not the finding we set out for, and it is the one we would keep.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
The University regards the study as characteristic of a School that has made the undefined measure its subject, and takes the schedule’s adoption as evidence that the work is already being put to use. Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, described that adoption as “the ordinary way a definition settles: not by agreement on the term, but by attachment to something that can be filed against it.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.g0qn6j.