A new Slop University brochure showcases the School of Emergent Priorities' survey work on official discretion, from a vignette method that compares how different officers read the same case to the published outputs it draws together.
A new brochure showcases a survey built to catch a judgement call before it becomes a record, alongside eight outputs from the civic-life corpus
A form that reaches two regional offices on the same afternoon can come back marked two different ways, and Slop University’s newest brochure treats that gap as the finding rather than the noise. Measuring the Judgement Call, released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, gathers the University’s research programme on discretion in civic-administrative life alongside eight previously published outputs drawn from across its civic-life corpus — the release marks the first time that programme has been bundled into a single public-facing document.
The brochure’s centrepiece describes a vignette-survey method the Trajectory Analytics Group runs across regional offices: identical case files placed in front of different officers administering the same scheme, with each office’s decision recorded and compared rather than assumed to agree. The School of Continuous Improvement’s Evaluation of Evaluation program then converts what the survey finds into a single published tolerance band, adopted across every participating office.
An officer’s judgement looks unanimous right up until you put two of them in the same room. We would rather publish the disagreement than pretend it isn’t there.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group, School of Emergent Priorities
Doctoral candidate Hedvig Anyanwu, whose own survey work features in the brochure, said the showcase reflects “how much of what we call a rule is actually just the last officer who happened to answer.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wbvcyl.