Interviews and action-group discussion: psychosocial dimensions of digital exclusion in disadvantaged neighbourhoods

METADATA-ONLY dataset - full content cannot be shared due to privacy reasons. This study adopted a qualitative design to explore how residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods make sense of everyday information and navigate digital and institutional communication. The research proceeded in two interconnected stages. The first stage focused on everyday information practices: where residents turn for clarification, how they interpret and emotionally respond to institutional or digital messages, and how neighbourhood dynamics shape their engagement with information. The second stage created space for collaborative interpretation, enabling participants to revisit and refine emerging themes.Fieldwork was carried out in six disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the Czech Republic, each publicly recognised as a disadvantaged neighbourhood. These areas are characterised by long-term unemployment, limited educational opportunities, debt enforcement, insecure housing and persistent territorial stigma. The six neighbourhoods were selected from the Moravskoslezský kraj and Ústecký kraj, two regions consistently ranking among the most socially excluded in the Czech Republic according to the Index of Social Exclusion (Agency for Social Inclusion in Czechia, Citation2024). This composite index aggregates municipal-level indicators of unemployment, long-term benefit dependency, debt enforcement, educational attainment and housing precarity. In several municipalities within these regions, unemployment rates reach exceptionally high levels — reported in some cases at 80–85%—reflecting long-term detachment from the formal labour market and widespread reliance on welfare benefits. Educational disadvantage is similarly pronounced, with a substantial share of residents having only basic schooling and very limited progression to secondary or vocational qualifications (Agency for Social Inclusion for Czechia, Citation2023). Within these structurally disadvantaged regions, specific neighbourhoods were identified using residential segregation methodologies (Sýkora, Citation2023) to capture the highest spatial concentrations of socio-economic marginalisation at the sub-municipal level. All sites are urban or peri-urban post-industrial settings. While not statistically representative, they constitute analytically critical cases of concentrated marginalisation, supporting theoretical generalisation regarding relational dynamics of digital exclusion in comparable contexts.Community centres and low-threshold organisations had been active in these neighbourhoods for several years and served as relationally attuned and trusted gateways for recruitment. Their presence was vital in communities marked by histories of institutional mistrust and where the appearance of outsiders can evoke anxiety or guardedness.Twenty-six participants took part in the study’s first stage, Participants were recruited through community workers and snowball sampling—strategies suited to relationally fragile environments and grounded in consent, trust and voluntariness. Most were mothers or grandmothers aged between their early twenties and early seventies and had lived in their neighbourhoods for between two and thirty-five years. To ensure confidentiality in small, socially visible communities, demographic information is presented only in aggregate.Interviews explored participants’ everyday information practices, their experiences with digitalised institutional communication, and the relational dynamics through which meaning-making takes place. The first interview invited participants to describe how they seek, verify, share or avoid information; how they navigate letters, emails or notifications from schools and welfare offices; and how stigma, past encounters or emotional discomfort shape their sense of what can safely be asked.The second interview, usually held several weeks later, allowed participants to return to earlier themes, clarify meanings and reflect more deeply on moments of confusion, shame, worry or relational dependence. These follow-up conversations also enabled the researcher to check emerging interpretations and minimise the risk of imposing external meanings. Interviews were held in locations chosen for their relational safety — community centres, outdoor courtyards, or participants’ homes. They ranged from thirty-five to one hundred and forty minutes, were audio-recorded with consent, and were transcribed verbatim.