Study title

In 2015 a team of researchers based in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Malta undertook interviews with refugees and migrants as well as stakeholders and observed events of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ as they unfolded. The dataset deposited here includes information on semi-structured interviews with a total of 500 refugees and migrants, 440 of whom had crossed the Mediterranean by boat in 2015 to Greece (215 interviews), Italy (205 interviews) and Malta (20 interviews) together with a further 60 respondents who had moved to Turkey and were considering making the onward journey to Europe. These countries reflected the key locations of the crisis. The initial analysis of the dataset has meant that it has been coded to record who was on the move, the journeys that they made and the routes that they took. This enables an examination of the relationship between micro-level characteristics and the geographies of migration that were recorded. Specifically the dataset here includes: 1. Methodological note - a description of the project, the approach to the fieldwork and the analysis undertaken 2. Individuals - data on the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the interviewees. 3. Routes - data on the routes taken by our interviewees and the duration taken to travel along them. 4. Journeys - data setting out the individual stops and journeys recorded from each interviewee, travel method between them and duration of travel. This has been prepared for insertion into GIS Mapping software. In the first six months of 2015 more than 100,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean, arriving at the shores of southern Europe in search of protection or a better life. In the same period more than 1,800 people lost their lives, drowning as overloaded and often unseaworthy boats sank into the sea. Although the crisis is in many ways nothing new, these scenes have captured the public and media imagination and have challenged the ability of European States to respond...