Ben showed us a slide this week with a photo of an alethiometer from the History of Science Museum, captioned: "Research is really about navigating uncertainty when we don't actually have an alethiometer." It's a good summary of the last few weeks. We will take a explanatory mixed research method: quantitative data first, qualitative data second.

Most of my time has gone into building a database of social enterprises across Oxfordshire, pulling from Companies House, the Charity Commission, Social Enterprise UK, B Corp, and half a dozen other registers that all define "social enterprise" slightly differently. The unexpected lesson has been how much of this is definitional work rather than data collection: before I can decide whether an organisation belongs in the database, I have to decide what actually counts, and the literature doesn't give a clean answer. I couldn't find organisations we met in Blackbird Leys, Communi-tea, CDI, Compass, RAW. Two potential reasons: First, national registers mostly catch what's big or formal enough to file paperwork, and miss neighbourhood-level organisations doing the real work. Second, those names might be different from their real names. 

The mixed methods session landed at a good moment. As a physicist I default to critical realism without thinking about it — reality exists independently of us, but our access to it is always mediated. Sitting through the session made me notice I'd been applying that instinct to a social science question without checking if it fit. Measuring "impact" isn't like a lab measurement . The frameworks in the literature (SROI, Theory of Change) all require someone to decide what counts as an outcome in the first place, which is an interpretivist move dressed up as a quantitative one. So the database is probably the quantitative backbone, and the qualitative layer is where the "why" will come from. An explanatory sequential design feels like the right shape, though probably messier in practice than the diagram suggests.

The leadership sessions with Anjali, Catherine, and Matthew have sat alongside all this as a reminder that research doesn't happen apart from how you work with people. I want to think harder about where those sessions have actually shaped how I approach the project, rather than treating them as a separate track.