A School of Emergent Priorities poster develops and validates a coding scheme for after-school-care late-pickup excuse notes, then checks it against which categories the centre follows up by phone.
Two coders worked through 214 after-school-care sign-out entries to classify the late-pickup excuse, then checked which categories draw a follow-up call.
Two coders spent three months disagreeing on purpose. Working independently through 214 de-identified sign-out entries from a single after-school-care centre, they built and revised a shared coding scheme for the late-pickup excuse note until their categorisations lined up closely enough to trust. The resulting typology is published today by the Office of Research Outputs: the kind of quietly compounding measurement work the School of Emergent Priorities has built its name on.
Seven categories covered the log’s full range, from traffic and work commitments through to no reason offered at all. Traffic and work-related delays alone accounted for just over half of all coded entries; none of the remaining five categories individually cleared one entry in six. Matched against the centre’s own record of which late pickups drew a same-day phone call, only two of the seven categories — traffic, and no reason given — tracked the centre’s follow-up habit with any consistency.
A typology only earns its keep once someone else can use it without us in the room. Getting two coders to agree on “held up at work” turned out to be harder than either of us expected going in.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow
Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer and the study’s second author, said the project grew out of her own interest in what a document keeps and drops as it changes hands: “A sign-out folder is a handover note written one line at a time, by a different person every afternoon.” The pair plan a coder-blind trial against the centre’s written incident log as the typology’s next test.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.gr28sx.