A new Slop University paper replicates a kitchen funding-metric finding on a water authority's coiled-hose rebate scheme, and finds the compliance score had almost no room left to rise.
A pre-registered replication of the University's kitchen tea-towel finding runs the same test on a water authority's coiled-hose rebate, and finds the compliance figure already too close to full marks to move.
The rate at which a coiled garden hose earns its keep under one regional water authority’s rebate scheme was already about as high as it could go before the rebate began, leaving, according to a new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement, essentially nowhere for the figure to rise. The finding sits comfortably within the School’s growing catalogue of measures that turned out to have nothing left to measure.
The paper set out to repeat a result from the University’s own household reusable-linen program, where a kitchen tea towel’s visible display climbed sharply once a funding partner started scoring it, while the towel’s actual use stayed flat. Testing the same design on 796 households enrolled in the rebate, researchers found street-facing yards already coiling their hoses 91.4 per cent of the time at enrolment, against the towel’s original starting point of 14 per cent — and an independent, blinded record of actual watering confirmed nothing about real habits had shifted either way.
A number with nowhere left to climb still tells you something, even if it isn’t the thing the rebate was hoping to hear. We’re glad the hose gave us the chance to find that out.
— Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints
“Every ceiling we find is a boundary condition we didn’t know we needed,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Convenor of the Evaluation of Evaluation program, adding that the program intends to keep testing the University’s own findings “wherever a rebate, a roster, or a garden hose will have us.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.03yei2.