A School of Continuous Improvement poster finds a home-insurance discount tied to self-reported smoke-alarm testing keeps paying out well after the audited alarm stops matching the record.
A five-level household maturity model built for a home-insurance rebate keeps its top rung long after the ceiling alarm stops earning it.
A household’s smoke-alarm test now leaves two records: the level a resident logs on the insurer’s discount portal, and whatever a technician finds on the ceiling. Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Demo Quarter in the School of Continuous Improvement, led a study of 214 households enrolled in a regional home-insurance mutual’s smoke-alarm discount scheme, comparing self-reported maturity levels against unannounced independent audits across four bands of enrolment tenure.
The self-reported level held steady near the scheme’s top rung throughout. The audited level did not, falling the longer a household held its discount, under a scheme rule that locks in a household’s highest logged level for the length of its policy. Working with Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard, Solberg’s team traces the divergence to the portal’s no-override clause rather than to any change in the alarms themselves.
The finding extends the School of Continuous Improvement’s running interest in what a compliance record keeps saying once the thing it was built to describe has moved on.
A record that only ever goes up tells you about the record, not the room.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter
“The gap was there from the first cohort,” said Dr Hanke. “What’s changed is that it now has a level attached to it.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ztr9pl.