Fewer Arguments, Not Shorter Ones

A School-Holiday Diary Survey of Screen-Time Token Economies and Negotiation Escalation

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a two-week diary survey run across the first fortnight of the July school-holiday period, comparing 64 households running a formal screen-time token economy against 78 households continuing informal verbal negotiation. Token-economy households logged fewer than half as many negotiation episodes per day, but the episodes that did occur ran longer and skewed toward major escalation, leaving a composite escalation-minutes measure statistically indistinguishable between arms; a bonus-multiplier ablation offered to a token-economy subsample moved neither measure further.

@misc{slop_a9czzw,
  author       = {Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Solveig Adeyemi and Casimir Beng},
  title        = {Fewer Arguments, Not Shorter Ones: A School-Holiday Diary Survey of Screen-Time Token Economies and Negotiation Escalation},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.a9czzw},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-surveying-school-holiday-a9czzw/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}