About the Brexit Lived Experience Archive
This archive opens up the qualitative data behind the ‘EU Citizens’ Identity, Belonging & Representation Post-Brexit Survey‘, conducted in early 2021. The survey’s findings are presented in an accompanying data overview report; this archive makes the underlying free-text responses themselves available to search, read and use. In essence, this is the online version of a primary source collection, published this way because the volume of data make it impossible to publish it in any other way.
What’s in it
The archive holds 10,211 responses from 2,414 respondents, across 9 questions — approximately 300,000 words of first-person testimony from EU citizens in the UK.
Responses are not the same as respondents. Each person was asked several questions, so one respondent appears multiple times; on average about four responses each. That’s why the archive holds 10,211 cards but only 2,414 people stand behind them. It matters when you read the filter counts: the demographic filters count responses, not people, so with no filters applied they add up to 10,211, not 2,414. The theme filters add up to more than 10,211, because a single response can be tagged with more than one theme.
The published report counts 2,424 valid survey responses, people who completed the survey. This archive holds the 2,414 of them who left at least one free-text answer cleared for publication here; the small remainder answered only tick-box questions or left nothing usable. The report’s demographic figures are also given per person, whereas the archive’s filter counts are per response, so the two won’t match line-for-line (and they do not have to as we are looking at this from different positions).
Finding your way around
The archive serves different people differently. A few starting points:
- Researchers and students: Use the filters to narrow testimony by theme, region, part of the UK, age band, length of residence or survey question, and use each response’s link to cite an individual entry.
- Policymakers and civil servants: The archive shows the texture of an experience and how often it recurs across the dataset; for representativeness, headline proportions and the quantitative findings, use the accompanying overview report, which sits behind every theme here.
- Citizens’-rights campaigners and advocacy groups: Search or filter to the issue you are working on, and use the per-response links to quote and share specific testimony. The notes on anonymity and curation below set out how responses were handled.
- Journalists and writers: The free-text search is the fastest route to a vivid, specific account on a given topic; each response carries a citable link. Please note: search is currently still ‘learning’, so not fully indexed yet. So you may also find the themes particularly relevant.
- EU citizens who lived this: Browse by place using the Part of the UK and Region filters, or by Theme, to find experiences that resonate.
- General readers: This guide and the report provide the context that makes the testimony legible; the themes are a good way in.
A note for all readers
These are real people’s words, reproduced as they were written. Many describe painful experiences: feeling unwelcome, insecurity about their status, xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and impacts on mental health, alongside the wider strain Brexit placed on their sense of home, identity and wellbeing. Reading them can be difficult, particularly if you have lived through similar experiences yourself, or as the family member or friend of an EU citizen.
Because responses appear in their original wording, they occasionally include phrasing that may be jarring or upsetting. As one example, the EU Settlement Scheme is usually abbreviated by respondents as “EUSS,” but in a small number of responses it is shortened to “SS”; this is an abbreviation that can be distressing to read for some readers given its historical associations.
In balancing open access to the data with the wellbeing of readers and respondents, some of the most harmful or distressing entries are not currently included in the archive. How best to handle this is still being considered.
If anything here affects you and you would like to talk to someone, the Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, every day, from across the UK and Ireland: call 116 123 (free) or email jo@samaritans.org.
The nine questions from the survey covered here
Each response answers one of these. The number is how many responses the archive holds for that question. Some questions were shown only to people on particular survey routes; for example, the settled-status and proving-status questions were asked only of those who held that status. This is why the totals differ.
Identity and integration
- Identity (2,372): What ‘identity’ means to the respondent: their first thoughts on the term, whether national, class, gender, several identities at once, or none.
- Integration (2,386): What ‘integration’ means to them: local community, cultural participation, taking part in British democracy — whatever came to mind.
- Brexit & identity (1,300): Any further thoughts on how Brexit has affected their sense of who they are, beyond the survey’s tick-boxes.
Belonging and home
- Belonging (1,702): More on their sense of belonging and feeling at home (or not) in the UK: what shapes it, and what changed because of Brexit.
- Feeling at home (804): Mor those who said feeling at home “depends on the situation or where I am,” a space to explain what it depends on.
Status and rights
- Settled status (769): Concerns or issues with settled status: accessing rights, maintaining status, practical things like taking out a mortgage.
- Proving status (394). Their experience of being asked to prove their status: where it happened, and any consequences.
- Citizenship (69): For those who chose “other” when asked how acquiring British citizenship made them feel, a space to say how.
Open comments
- Final comments (415): A free space for anything else about the survey’s topics or Brexit’s wider impact on them.
The demographic information
Every response carries the respondent’s profile, which you can filter and combine. The categories are:
- Region of origin: North-Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central & Eastern Europe, Other / Non-EU.
- Part of the UK: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Other.
- Age bands: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65-74, 75+.
- Years in the UK: Grouped into bands: 0–5, 6–10, 11–20, 21–30, 31+.
- Feels at home in the UK: Yes, No, It depends.
Gender was also collected in the survey but is not currently included in this archive — see About the data below.
Themes and coding
Each response is tagged with one or more of 20 themes (for example: status insecurity, belonging & home, racism & xenophobia, politics & government), so you can read across the dataset by topic. These themes were applied manually by the research team, so they are an interpretive layer added to the data, not part of the original survey (though they relate to questions). Manual coding of this kind always involves judgement; it will remain a work in progress for some time yet. Please bear that in mind when using the data.
Two things follow from that:
- The themes are not exhaustive: They capture the main recurring patterns across the responses, not every topic raised. When you are looking for something specific that is not a theme, the free-text search will be helpful (though is not yet optimised fully). For instance, a good number of responses mention COVID-19 and Scottish independence; neither is coded as a theme, but searching the text surfaces them.
- Themes point to patterns, not fixed categories: A response tagged “integration & reciprocity,” for example, reflects how that person discussed what integration means to them; the tag is a way in, not a precise definition.
How to read the filters
The counts beside each filter are contextual. As soon as you select any value, every other filter recalculates to show only what’s still reachable within that selection, so the numbers drop below the full totals. That can help discover patterns (for example, how responses about one theme are distributed across regions). To return to the full picture, clear your filters.
About the data and research
How responses are presented: Responses are reproduced as respondents wrote them. They are not generally edited; they appear verbatim, including spelling, grammar and typographical errors, which are left in deliberately. The only changes made are to protect anonymity in line with ethics approval granted: where a response contained details that could identify someone, those details have been removed or replaced, and any such change is marked with square brackets. Relatedly, although the survey is about home and belonging rather than nationality, respondents sometimes named their country of origin within an answer; where that country is represented by only a small number of people, it has occasionally been removed as a further layer of protection.
What is and is not included: Only responses cleared for publication are shown. Blank answers and non-responses (such as “n/a” or “none”) have been removed, as they carry no content. A small number of responses that were personalised insults directed at individuals have also been removed: the archive is a record of lived experience, not a vehicle for abuse. To protect anonymity, some detail is deliberately not published: exact ages and countries of birth are withheld, length of residence is shown in bands rather than exact years, and the demographic categories are kept broad for the same reason.
Gender: Gender is not currently included in the archive. This is a deliberate, additional layer of protection. How best to present this information is still being considered, so for now the archive is presented without it. The accompanying report provides a topline overview of the gender breakdown.
The accompanying report: Bueltmann, Tanja and Bulat, Alexandra (2021) EU Citizens’ Identity, Belonging & Representation Post-Brexit: Full Report. University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/82036/. It presents the study’s full findings, quantitative data and interview case studies.
A note on ethics: The research underpinning this archive was granted ethical approval by the School of Humanities Ethics Committee, University of Strathclyde, in 2021. Participant information were provided at the time that set out that in addition to contributing to the academic literature on EU migration, identity, belonging, and representation, the study hopes to impact policymaking discussions on citizenship and political rights. This online primary source collection of Brexit lived experiences cuts across both. As set out, respondents are not identified in any report or publication emerging from this project and this archive only contains responses from those who provided informed consent, confirming that they read and understood the information for participants provided.