Qualitative Election Study of Britain Pre-Election Transcripts, 2024

This dataset contains a spreadsheet with the participant's alias together with some political and socio-demographic data and the anonymised pre-election transcripts. There are twenty-four transcripts in the dataset, one set are in Word and the other in OpenDocument Text. Files are named according to who participated in the focus group or interview. Each transcript contains a table with some basic sociodemographic and political data on the participants.

Participants participated in an icebreaker and were asked their opinions on the snap election, the party leaders, what considerations were going into their vote choice, and impressions of the campaign. If there was time or it was not discussed, they were asked which campaign messages stood out to them and their views on tactical voting.

All participants’ names were changed to a permanent alias that allows them to be tracked across elections and any direct or indirect identifiers removed to protect their anonymity.  The transcripts were then formatted to create two levels of headings: topics and aliases. This is designed to help researchers more easily find the information they need. Please be aware that while topic headings have been added to the transcripts, participants sometimes provide information that anticipates later questions or provide additional information to a prior question later in the in discussion. If you are interested in a particular topic, we encourage to review the entire transcript to capture all the relevant data.

The post-election dataset and leader’s evaluation answers data will be released in 2025.