A School of Emergent Priorities study matches ten years of committee-meeting sign-in sheets against life-membership nomination records at twenty-two suburban bowls clubs, and reports the correlation the sport's culture assumes simply isn't there.
A decade of sign-in sheets across twenty-two suburban bowls clubs turns up no relationship between meetings attended and life membership awarded, and the finding stops there.
Dr Petra Umbile of the School of Emergent Priorities set out to test an assumption bowls clubs rarely examine: that life membership, the sport’s most durable form of recognition, tracks how often the member in question turns up. Working with ten years of committee-meeting sign-in sheets from twenty-two suburban clubs, matched against each club’s own life-membership nomination records, the study looked for the relationship the culture takes for granted.
It isn’t there. Attendance frequency, counted meeting by meeting across the full decade, showed no measurable association with whether or when a member was nominated, awarded, or passed over — a relationship close enough to zero that the team is not proposing a refinement, a longer window, or a different measure to go looking for it again.
Recognition and record-keeping are not the same act, and a life-membership badge does not know how many meetings you sat through to earn it.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
“We checked whether we’d mismeasured attendance, and we hadn’t,” said Dr Umbile. “The number is the number.”
The School of Continuous Improvement’s Dr Renke Sabel, invited to review the sign-in-sheet coding ahead of publication, called the result “a useful reminder that not every ledger a committee keeps is secretly measuring something else.” The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.etvyz5.