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.
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Anqi, this is an excellent reflection. I am particularly happy to hear my alethiometer metaphor was helpful. If you haven't seen His Dark Materials on BBC iPlayer, it is well worth your time. The alethiometer callback in your post provides a memorable thread that ties the reflection together and captures an important aspect of the research process.
Your discussion of building the social enterprise database was especially insightful. You move beyond describing the practical challenge to recognise that defining your population is itself a research decision. Your observation that 'definitional work' precedes data collection demonstrates an appreciation that methodological choices shape the evidence we are ultimately able to collect.
I also found your reflections on mixed methods particularly interesting. Your comparison between measuring physical phenomena and measuring social impact shows that you are beginning to think critically about the assumptions underlying different research approaches. Recognising that apparently quantitative frameworks still rely on interpretive judgements is an important methodological insight.
Your final paragraph also raises an interesting question. You note that you want to think more carefully about how the leadership sessions have influenced your approach to the project. I'd encourage you to revisit that over the coming weeks. It will be helpful to consider how leadership is expressed through your research decisions — for example, in how you engage stakeholders, define success, handle uncertainty, and communicate findings.
Overall, this is a thoughtful, engaging reflection. I'm looking forward to seeing how your thinking develops as your quantitative analysis begins and you start integrating the qualitative evidence.