Text One: A fictional report on a community repair session.

At a Saturday session, volunteers worked on a bicycle with a loose chain and a kettle that would not switch on. A reporter watched the volunteers explain each step to the owners. One owner said she had learned how to check the bicycle chain herself. The reporter noted that the bicycle was repaired before the kettle, partly because the volunteers needed a tool that was already being used elsewhere.

The room was busy when the reporter arrived. People waiting to speak to a volunteer stood near the entrance, while those watching repairs gathered around the worktables. The reporter left before the session ended. Her account described what she saw during that visit, but it did not cover every repair or everyone who attended.

Text Two: A fictional account of a group reviewing feedback from a different repair project.

A group collected feedback forms from people who had attended three repair sessions. Several respondents said they had enjoyed meeting other people while waiting. Others valued taking an item home in working order. The group noted that the forms came from people who chose to complete one before leaving.

The group also spoke by telephone to a small number of people who had attended but left without a repair. One person said that the wait had been too long; another said that watching the work had helped them understand how an item could be repaired. The group did not treat these comments as representative of everyone who left early.

In its summary, the group separated comments about the experience of attending from evidence that an item had been repaired. It could describe what respondents had said and what happened in the cases it had recorded, but it could not establish that every visitor had the same experience or that every repair would last.