A School of Continuous Improvement survey of 214 households across nine streets finds self-reported pantry days-of-supply cluster tightly around the instrument's own printed thresholds, and a commissioning council has adopted the unadjusted street medians as a public stockpile advisory tier.
Self-reported days-of-supply from 214 households land suspiciously close to the thresholds printed on the survey card, and a council is publishing the tiers regardless
Emergency-preparedness guidance already asks residents to estimate their own pantry depth in days; the School of Continuous Improvement’s newest survey is the first to check what a council does once nine streets’ worth of those estimates come back.
Reply-paid postcards went to 214 households across nine streets this summer, each asking for a self-estimated days-of-supply across four pantry staples. Fifty-eight per cent of responses landed within a single day of one of the survey card’s own three printed thresholds — seven, fourteen, and thirty days — against a nineteen per cent rate the University’s analysis would expect from chance alone.
A number that lands exactly where the form invited it to land is telling you something about the form.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory, School of Continuous Improvement
The commissioning committee is proceeding regardless. Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer at the School, called the resulting street-level ratings “the fastest a self-report has ever become a public tier in this University’s experience,” and noted that no re-audit has yet been scheduled. The three-tier scale — Bronze, Silver, Gold — was fixed before a single postcard came back.
The University regards the survey as a model for how quickly a well-designed instrument can be put to public use, and expects to extend the postcard method to further streets in due course.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7okxv8.