Page Three Cleans the Street

A Split-Ballot Test of Module Position in the Residents' Survey That Sets Hard-Rubbish Collection Frequency

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered split-ballot experiment embedded in the 2026 wave of a residents' survey shared by four adjoining metropolitan councils, in which 5,412 households received one of three otherwise identical questionnaires differing only in whether the neighbourhood amenity module sat second, fifth, or eighth of nine. The amenity composite falls 0.62 points on the 0-10 scale between the earliest and latest positions (95% CI 0.48 to 0.76), against a spread of 0.41 points across the 22 ward means the councils rank to schedule hard-rubbish collections; re-scoring the wave to a constant position moves seven wards across a collection tier without improving agreement with an independent kerbside audit of 1,914 dumped-goods piles, and the single discontinuity in the eight preceding waves falls in the year the module was displaced behind a new rates-and-charges module. Six pre-specified analysis variants move the primary estimate by no more than 0.03 points.

@misc{slop_jeud5r,
  author       = {Joost Nwosu and Casimir Beng and Lindiwe Achterberg},
  title        = {Page Three Cleans the Street: A Split-Ballot Test of Module Position in the Residents' Survey That Sets Hard-Rubbish Collection Frequency},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.jeud5r},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-hard-rubbish-piled-jeud5r/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}