It was such a delight to finally commence the Laidlaw Research Summer. I was incredibly lucky to be blessed with an insightful and dedicated team. Our goal, alongside OSEP, is to form a database of the various social enterprises present within the city and wider Oxfordshire. As encouraged by our lovely supervisor Mengchen Suo, we are working on a framework for impact measurement which can be applied to such database.

We recognised that it is highly limiting to consider the impact of social enterprises solely from an economic standpoint. However, we also recognise that attempting to source value through measurements of social, environmental and communal impact, due to its qualitative nature, is extremely difficult. This sets us an extensive and stimulating task for the six weeks ahead, which I am eager to undertake alongside my team mates. We have even amusingly nicknamed ourselves 'The Database' in anticipation of the work ahead of us. 

This week, after constructing our research proposal and research strategy, we have been focusing primarily on a preliminary literature review as well as building the foundations of the database. We were in a bit of a difficult position as the assignment requested by OSEP was almost too simple while the research brief provided by Laidlaw was an essentially limitless and thus unachievable task. This meant our first job was breaking down the question into a series of achievable and researchable goals - leading to our conclusions established above. In order to ensure that we were able to appropriately track and manage our tasks, we created a Monday.com board which allows us to assign and monitor the tasks we are meant to undertake as part of this project. 

I was assigned the job of working with Isabel (a member of my team) to conduct the literature review. It has been a challenging but rewarding task overviewing the difficulties that researchers have faced when attempting to measure and indeed define what impact means in a sociological context. We have overviewed several methods of measurement, including the limitations and benefits of 'Theory of Change' and 'Social Return on Investment'. This is an ongoing process which I recognise I must speed up the pace of, so that we may begin applying our findings to a newfound framework. 

This week we were also privileged to receive insightful workshops on programs which are tantamount to the success of both our database and framework. It was very useful learning how to properly manage an Excel spreadsheet as this will make the creation of our database a far more efficient process. Similarly, the workshop on NVivo is useful in teaching us how to code our qualitative data, which will assist with the surveys and interviews we intend to carry out later in the project. The date we collect and process through Excel and NVivo will be paramount to the framework we intend to create.

As the project slowly rolls into motion, these last few days have been productive but light. However, I look forward to the steam picking up as we advance into the summer and are able to make a real change!!