A fourteen-week RFID study across 46 households finds a fridge chore chart's assignment no better than chance at predicting who actually does the task.
A 14-week RFID study across 46 kitchens finds the magnet's assignment no likelier than chance to match who actually washes up
Slop University has closed a fourteen-week study of the ordinary fridge chore chart, reporting that the household’s own assignment forecasts nothing about who ends up at the sink. The result belongs to the School of Continuous Improvement’s slower project of asking which of the institution’s own coordination habits earn the confidence placed in them.
A chart earns its authority by being consulted, not by being right. We were interested in how long a household keeps consulting one that is neither.
— Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
The project instrumented forty-six households for a full school term, tagging each fridge chart’s magnets and reading presence at the sink, the bin store and the laundry door, then setting the comparison and its stopping point before a single week’s roster was pinned up. The assigned name matched the logged doer about as often as the household’s own roster size would predict by chance alone, and the match did not improve as the term went on.
“Every duty board we operate makes the same silent promise the fridge chart made. We can no longer say we haven’t checked,” said Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile, a co-author on the project. On the strength of the finding, the Office for Continuous Improvement has withdrawn assignment-board compliance as a recognised proxy across every roster, sign-out sheet and duty board it administers.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8srf3i.