Guessed at the Door, Confirmed at the Table

A Field Validation of a Book Club Host's Skip-Likelihood Index Against an Anonymous Show of Hands

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement reports the design and field validation of the Skip-Likelihood Index, a five-item instrument through which a book club host scores each attendee for likely non-completion before an anonymous, independently-collected show of hands closes the meeting. Across 214 meetings of 27 clubs, the index's five items show good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.81) but only modest meeting-level agreement with the confession count (r = 0.44), a relationship traced almost entirely to a single item; a 38-meeting two-host subsample finds only fair agreement on individual attendees (kappa = 0.29).

@misc{slop_3hjzqw,
  author       = {Runa Adegoke and Renke Sabel},
  title        = {Guessed at the Door, Confirmed at the Table: A Field Validation of a Book Club Host's Skip-Likelihood Index Against an Anonymous Show of Hands},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.3hjzqw},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-discussion-log-instrument-3hjzqw/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}