Reading the riots: interviews with people involved in the London riots 2011

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This data archive contains 224 transcripts of participant testimonies of a sample of people involved in the disturbances referred to as the August 2011 English riots. The Beyond Contagion project redacted the transcripts to protect the identity of participants, formatted and organised them by location of event and gender.

The names above relate to the specific data archive and not the ESRC funded project. This ESRC funded project was led by Professors John Drury, Clifford Stott and Stephen Reicher. It was developed to address the question of how and why does aggression and violent behaviour spread? When, as in 2011, riots began in London, why did they then occur in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool? One of the most common ways of addressing such issues is through the notion of 'contagion'. The core idea is that, particularly in crowds, mere exposure to the behaviour of others leads observers to behave in the same way. Despite this widespread acceptance, the 'contagion' account has major problems in explaining the spread of behaviours. For example, in 2011, disturbances spread from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool but they did not spread to Sheffield, Leeds or Glasgow. 'Contagion' explanations cannot explain such patterns and limits because they assume that transmission is automatic. The 'contagion metaphor' does not take account of the social relations between the transmitter and receiver. This project proposes a new theoretical account of behavioural transmission based on the social identity approach in social psychology. This suggests that influence processes are limited by group boundaries and group content: we are more influenced by ingroup members than by outgroup members, and we are more influenced by that which is consonant with rather than contradictory to group norms. In order to advance both theoretical understanding and practical interventions, our research develops a social identity analysis of transmission processes at multiple levels. For one element of this project, we examined the spread of urban disorder during the 2011 English riots. As part of this aspect of the project team were granted special access to a data-set collected by the Guardian/LSE 'Reading the Riots' study led by Professor Tim Newburn of the LSE and Paul Lewis from the Guardian newspaper. The Beyond Contagion team were given electronic copies of transcripts from 224 interviews with participants carried out within a few months following the events. This, along with other secondary sources (such as detailed crime figures), allowed us to examine the extent to which the spread of these riots was linked to a sense of shared identity with those who had rioted previously (that is, those who rioted 'saw themselves' in those who rioted before them, and those who lacked such a sense were less likely to riot). The specific data archive deposited here are the 224 transcripts provided to the Beyond Contagion project. The Beyond Contagion team redacted the transcripts to protect the anonymity of the interviewees, formatted them and organised them by location and gender.