Sunday, 1 December 2024

This week in research #51

It's been a slow week again this week, as I've been travelling for the Australia New Zealand Regional Science International (ANZRSAI) Conference in Canberra (more on that next week). Nevertheless, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

  • Borbely et al. (open access) find that a universal free school meal policy covering the first three grades of primary schools in Scotland had a small positive effect on attendance and a small negative effect on health-related absences (potentially important results given New Zealand's free school lunch policy and mooted changes)
  • Asanov, Schirmacher, and Bühren (open access) conduct a meta-analysis of 'lost letter' experiments (78 studies with an overall sample size of 53,504 letters from 18 countries), and find that the return rate is lower for political or deviant issues, stamped letters are more likely to be returned, but letters with money are not more likely to be returned, and a high socio-economic environment increases the chances of the return