Believing in European bridges

By Stan Bride

Peace Lab is truly an intense class which concludes with an equally intense, yet extremely rewarding project. With Rosa, we chose to study the different perceptions of the European Union for people in potential future member-states (Kosovo and Serbia), and people from current EU member-states (France, Netherlands, Germany, and Bulgaria). To do this, we interviewed people from these countries and asked them about their perceptions of the EU, but also about elements which, according to them, unite (or not) the European community. Near the end of the month, we gathered all our transcribed interviews, which we then summarized into little paragraphs and placed below a picture of the participants. Our aim was to produce a diversity of concise and personal paragraphs in an attempt to represent the spectrum of different perceptions of the European Union.

I will briefly describe the three main steps of the development of our project before giving my impressions. First is the elaboration phase during which we refined the scope of our project, developed our questions and contacted the participants. This is, in my view, the most important phase as it would serve as the basis for the rest of the project. Second is the actual content of the project: the interviews. Third and last is creating the final product and this is when the project really takes shape. These phases will most likely appear to you as rather basic, but, having had little or no experience with qualitative research before Peace Lab myself, I thought it would be interesting to make this division explicit.

Overall, I think the first elaboration phase was the toughest. Like many of us, the fact that we were not physically in Kosovo made it very hard to find participants for the interviews. In fact, we did not receive any responses in the first three days. Ironically, once we found our first participants we suddenly started to receive the answers until eventually, we actually had to refuse some because we had too many people. 

In our case, the second phase, during which we conducted the interviews, was paradoxically both the core of the project and the moment where we had the least understanding of what the final product would look like. However, I now realize that it is important not to think too much about the final product at this stage as it may cause us to unwillingly (or not) influence the respondents into saying what we would like them to say and creating biases in the project. Surprisingly, once we had all our interviews and transcriptions done, the recurrent themes became much more explicit and the project almost magically unfolded. Within a day, we had our final product ready and uploaded our results in a closed Facebook group where the participants could exchange or at least view other contributions.

Interestingly, most of the people we interviewed were very happy to be interviewed. Whether it was from current or future EU member-states, it seemed that they enjoyed being asked their opinions on the matter but most importantly, I think they enjoyed the fact that we specifically asked for their own opinions, their own perceptions and their own feelings regarding the European Union. We were very proud to see this project finished, which was also a nice reward for the last intense month and these last three years.