Our Lives Asylum Seekers

This dataset contains project materials and interview transcripts from a qualitative study aiming to undertake a nuanced analysis of phenomena surrounding the acceptance of asylum seekers by interviewing a subset of the Our Lives cohort to better appreciate why some young Australians are accepting of asylum seekers.

The broader Our Lives project ([https://ourlives.org.au/] www.ourlives.org.au) is a longitudinal study following, among other things, the social and political orientations of a single age cohort of young people in Queensland, Australia as they move from adolescence into adulthood. For nearly a decade, the study has been collecting both quantitative and qualitative data from this group of young people on different domains of their lives.

The goal of the qualitative investigation was to listen to participants speak on the topic of asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat, and to consider how they come to understand what they ‘know’ about the issue and how this relates to their attitudes and actions towards ‘boat people’. It was undertaken by applying a purposive intensity sampling strategy to identify potential participants, selecting respondents who had strongly agreed or strongly disagreed with the statement ‘All boats carrying asylum seekers should be turned back’ in the 2010 Our Lives survey. Ultimately interviews were conducted in 2012 with 20 young people who had indicated in their response to the question that they held firm views on the asylum issue.