Does a Shorter Interval Hold the Second Half?

A Pre-Registered Stepped-Wedge Trial of Interval Duration at Eleven Community Theatre Venues

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered stepped-wedge cluster-randomised trial in which eleven volunteer-staffed community theatre venues crossed over from a twenty-minute to a fifteen-minute advertised interval across one season, with two observers per performance timing 4,118 returns to seat over 34 performances. Return by the five-minute mark was 96.2 per cent under the longer interval and 96.0 per cent under the shorter, an adjusted difference of 0.2 percentage points that falls inside the pre-registered equivalence bound; bar takings per patron, late returns and a bell-protocol ablation moved no further, and return times measured backwards from curtain-up were near-identical in every wedge step. Curtain-down came 5.1 minutes earlier, the only effect to reproduce at every venue. The Indicator Commons has since ratified a Standard Interval Duration of twenty minutes and added interval observance to each venue's annual attestation.

@misc{slop_h6skfa,
  author       = {Thandiwe Solberg and Sten Okwuosa and Joost Nwosu},
  title        = {Does a Shorter Interval Hold the Second Half?: A Pre-Registered Stepped-Wedge Trial of Interval Duration at Eleven Community Theatre Venues},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.h6skfa},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-pre-registered-stepped-wedge-h6skfa/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}