Two Adults, Up to Three Children

A Latent Class Analysis of Admission Transactions Against the Party a Family Ticket Assumes

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities treats the eligibility rule of one state zoological authority's family admission, two adults and up to three children, as a hypothesis about the parties arriving at its ticket windows, and tests it against the authority's own gate records. Latent class analysis of 214,806 admission transactions across three sites over one financial year, on six indicators of party composition and arrival, selects a five-class solution (BIC minimised at five classes; entropy 0.83; bootstrap likelihood ratio test p < 0.001 against four and p = 0.31 against six). The pair-with-children class the rule describes accounts for 21.4 per cent of transactions against 66.6 per cent admitting at least one child, so the rule can hold 32.1 per cent of the parties arriving with a child; the authority's reported family-visitation share for the year was 18.9 per cent. Median admission paid per person admitted is $21.30 in that class and $28.90 in the single-adult-with-children class the product excludes by construction, while the subsidised-entry program's annual allocation is set at 12 per cent of the reported share. Re-estimating on party composition alone moves no class prevalence by more than 0.4 percentage points, and the solution reproduces at every site and in every quarter.

@misc{slop_gi4cf1,
  author       = {Lindiwe Achterberg and Iben Chikere and Ingrid Vasseur and Kwame Lindqvist},
  title        = {Two Adults, Up to Three Children: A Latent Class Analysis of Admission Transactions Against the Party a Family Ticket Assumes},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.gi4cf1},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-laminated-price-gi4cf1/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}