A new Slop University research poster compares fire-emoji counts in a parents' group chat against booking-app fill times for a school holiday program, and reports a clean null across a full season.
A season-long comparison finds reaction counts predict nothing about a school holiday program's booking-app fill times.
No measurable relationship. That is the entire result of a new School of Emergent Priorities research poster, and the study is proud enough of it to publish nothing else.
Led by Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile with Lecturer Marek Solheim and Dr Anouk Mensah, the team spent a full season logging how enthusiastically a school holiday program’s parents’ group chat greeted each session’s announcement, then checking that enthusiasm against how quickly the same session’s places were claimed on the program’s booking app. Fifty-eight sessions, one regional network, four terms: reaction counts and booking timestamps compared side by side, with the announcement itself held to a fixed template throughout.
An emoji is the fastest thing a parent can do with a phone. It turns out to be exactly that fast, and nothing more.
— Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile
“The program’s own capacity report still opens with the chat’s tally,” said Lecturer Marek Solheim, “and nothing in our data gave us a reason to ask anyone to change that.” The School treats a well-run null as no smaller a contribution than a positive result, and lists this one alongside its others.
Dr Anouk Mensah credited the season’s length for the clarity of the result: a shorter run, she noted, would have left room to blame the weather, the term dates, or one unusually popular session for a pattern that simply never showed up. The team is not proposing a further trial. As far as this poster is concerned, the question is closed.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sb5vvk.