UK Voices: New Methods for Understanding the Impact of Social Change on Individual Lives, 2024

This data consists of 12 semi-strutured, participant led, qualitative biographical interviews, conducted during the scoping phase of the ESRC UK Voices Pilot Project. The aim of the interviews was to test a Topic Guide for producing a large-scale qualitative general purpose data set that provides insights into people's experiences and life in the UK. It is linked to an additional dataset of 38 interviews, conducted during the larger pilot.

UK Voices developed a methodology for building a general-use qualitative interview dataset to provide insights into how the UK population experiences and navigates accelerated social changes, including climate change, political polarisation, and inequality.

The project is piloted methods for large-scale qualitative data collection and analysis to enhance the UK’s social science research infrastructure. Funded by ESRC and running from October 2024 to June 2025, the project was organised into two main work packages. The data in this deposit was collected during work package 1, which first tested qualitative interview techniques for gathering in-depth data from a broad sample of the population, refining methods for large-scale qualitative research. This built on existing projects, such as the American Voices Project, to develop a methodology tailored to the UK context.

The second work package explored the use of generative AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to streamline the analysis of the extensive qualitative data collected. By leveraging these tools to assist in identifying and analysing key sections of text, this phase addressed some of the challenges regarding scaling qualitative research, which is often limited to small numbers of participants. The project ultimately aimed to create a flexible research platform that merges qualitative methods with innovative software tools, enabling more efficient analysis and broader exploration of critical social issues. The findings from this pilot have been shared with the wider social science community through reports, workshops, and conferences, laying the groundwork for future large-scale and cross-national qualitative research.