School of Emergent Priorities researchers tested a doorway card meant to return reusable shopping bags to the car boot, and found return rates holding at 63.4 per cent after the card was taken away, against a 34.1 per cent starting point.
Eighteen weeks in twenty-four households, four phases, and a withdrawal that settled well above where it started
A withdrawal phase is meant to take a household back to where it started. Across twenty-four households and eighteen weeks, none of them went. Measuring the Bags Changed How Often They Came Back, a research poster released this week by the School of Emergent Priorities, reports what happened when a laminated card at the internal door was put up, taken down, and put up again, while the households recorded what they did with their reusable shopping bags twice a day throughout.
Twenty-four households wrote down what they did with their bags, twice a day, for eighteen weeks. We owe them the observation that the writing down is what we ended up studying.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The work moves each household through a baseline, a prompted phase, a withdrawal and a reinstatement, tracking whether the bags returned to the boot within a day of the shopping being unpacked. Return rates rose sharply once the card went up and stayed high once it came down, settling at 63.4 per cent against a 34.1 per cent baseline, with only two households in twenty-four falling back to anything like their own starting rate.
“The instrument turned out to be doing a share of the work we had assigned to the card,” said Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints in the School of Continuous Improvement, “and a share we cannot now measure without it.”
The University regards the result as an instructive one, and notes that the twice-daily log has been adopted by the Adaptive Metrics Lab as its standard household protocol. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.b51mo6.