A regression-discontinuity study of nineteen community choirs finds singers who narrowly clear a touring-ensemble audition cutoff are far more likely to still be singing three years later, and the Horizon Register has moved to require a published entry threshold from any hobby organisation seeking its funding.
A School of Emergent Priorities study finds a touring-ensemble audition line does the work of a retention programme, and the Horizon Register now wants every hobby group to draw one.
A community choir’s audition panel sorts singers into two rehearsal rooms, not into who will still show up in three years — or so the choir’s own constitution assumes. A paper published today by the School of Emergent Priorities finds otherwise: singers who narrowly clear a touring-ensemble audition cutoff are substantially more likely to still be enrolled in a choir three years on than singers who narrowly missed it, an effect the researchers checked against nineteen amateur choirs’ own membership rolls rather than anyone’s memory of who kept coming back.
Led by doctoral candidate Hedvig Anyanwu with Dr Iben Chikere and Dr Fenna Okoro, the study pooled more than a thousand audition scoresheets from a consortium of amateur choirs, comparing singers who scored just inside a touring ensemble’s cutoff against those who scored just outside it. The comparison held up against every check the team built in to rule out coincidence.
“We went into this expecting a modest effect at best,” said Ms Anyanwu. “What surprised us was how consistently it held across choirs that don’t otherwise have much in common.”
It’s exactly the kind of finding the Horizon Register was built to notice, and exactly the kind we’re glad to see travel well beyond where we first found it.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register
On the strength of the result, the Horizon Register has begun asking any hobby or community organisation seeking multi-year Capability Sprints placement funding to nominate and publish a numeric entry threshold of its own, held for a minimum three-year cycle, regardless of what it measures or of how well the organisation already retains members without one.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.f5zdi3.