Implementation of the PushBackLash project focus groups is finalised: the first results will be published soon

The European project PushBackLash – Countering Backlash to Gender Equality in Europe, funded by the Horizon Europe programme (Grant Agreement No. 101061687), has reached a key milestone with the completion of the focus groups included in the ‘Assessment of social perceptions of feminism, equality policies and democracy’.

This qualitative phase, coordinated by the University of Valencia (UVEG) and carried out in collaboration with PLUS (Austria) and ELTE (Hungary), consisted of conducting face-to-face focus groups in 3 European countries (soon to be 4), with a total of approximately 36 participants. The activity was designed based on a purposive sample stratified by age, educational level and political orientation, with the aim of capturing the ‘discursive diversity’ that exists among citizens around the concepts of democracy, gender equality and feminism. We will soon have the results from the UK through the collaboration of EXETER.

The focus groups have allowed us to explore in depth citizens’ perceptions of equality, the public policies that promote it and the current forms of backlash or reaction against feminism in Europe. This methodology, aligned with feminist and participatory approaches, has provided a corpus rich in nuances, useful for analysing how the notions of democracy and equality are collectively constructed in different cultural and political contexts.

The international consortium is currently immersed in the process of lexical-metric and thematic analysis of the transcripts, following a common methodological protocol that guarantees comparability between countries. The preliminary results will be available in the coming weeks and will form part of the Integrated Report on the evolution of gender attitudes in Europe, due out at the end of this year.

Read more about the Project here

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