Same Sign, Different Reading

A Thematic Analysis of Off-Leash Compliance Justifications at a Suburban Dog Park

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a semi-structured interview study (n = 52) at a suburban off-leash dog reserve, thematically coding each participant's account of their own dog's leash status against their account of a visible other user's. Self-directed accounts cluster on situational and dog's-need framing, while other-directed accounts cluster overwhelmingly on disregard (58% versus 3%), an asymmetry that survives a blinding ablation testing the coding scheme's own reliability rather than the theme distribution it is applied to.

@misc{slop_mca8ps,
  author       = {Casimir Beng and Solveig Adeyemi},
  title        = {Same Sign, Different Reading: A Thematic Analysis of Off-Leash Compliance Justifications at a Suburban Dog Park},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.mca8ps},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-thematic-coding-interview-mca8ps/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}