Qualitative Election Study of Britain Pre-Election Transcripts, 2024

Oliver, Thom and Carvalho, Edzia and Winters, Kristi (2025). Qualitative Election Study of Britain Pre-Election Transcripts, 2024. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857595

The Qualitative Election Study of Britain (QESB) is a longitudinal qualitative dataset documenting the real-world discourse of ordinary people, with rich data on their politics, over multiple elections and referendums. The QESB dataset consists of a series of longitudinal transcripts (in Word and Open Office Documents) covering multiple elections and referendums, with over 1.1 million words from 252 and participants to date. The data, structured by election year and pre and post election topics (e.g., impressions of the campaign, impressions of the party leaders, stories of their vote choice and election day), includes comprehensive socio demographic information (e.g. age, gender, regional location) and political indicators (e.g party affiliation, vote choice, including whether and how they voted in the EU referendum).

QESB has a core set of questions that have been asked at each election since 2010, including the pre-election topics such as perceptions of the campaigns, perceptions of the party leaders, most important issues, and the post-election topics of voluntary self-reported vote choice, recounting the story of their election day, and perceptions of the new government to allow researchers to identify topics of interest across time.

In June and July 2024, seventy-six eligible voters took part in pre-election online and in-person focus groups for the 2024 UK General Election. The Qualitative Election Study of Britain seeks to capture the complexities of why people vote the way they do by recording people talk about politics in their own words. Founded in 2010, it is the world’s longest running qualitative election study, providing researchers with a unique data resource for thematic, content, narrative and discourse analysis.

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. Files are named according to who participated in the focus group or interview. Participants were asked their opinions on the snap election, the party leaders, what considerations were going into their vote choice, and impressions of the campaign. The post-election dataset and leader’s evaluation answers data will be released in 2025.

Data description (abstract)

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.

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