From April 1 to 3, 2025, members of the TRUEDEM consortium met at Sciences Po Grenoble for a scheduled working meeting focused on the ongoing qualitative component of the project. This gathering, attended by representatives from multiple partner institutions across Europe, provided a structured opportunity for collective reflection on the progress made to date, and for practical coordination as the project moves into its next phase of analysis and dissemination.

The primary focus of the meeting was on the coding and interpretation of the more than 320 interviews that form the core of the project's qualitative dataset. These interviews, conducted with political and civic elites across twelve European countries, provide a rich empirical basis for examining how key democratic concepts—most notably trust—are articulated, negotiated, and framed by those in influential positions. The Grenoble meeting was therefore oriented around the shared task of organizing and analyzing this new qualitative data collection in the course of 2024.

One major area of discussion involved the structure and application of the project’s codebook, which was developed to guide systematic analysis of the interview data. The codebook had been substantially prepared in advance, but the meeting offered the chance to clarify its use, assess its coherence, and discuss adjustments in light of preliminary feedback from those beginning to work with the material. Several participants shared observations about how specific codes functioned in practice, including challenges that arose due to differences in national political contexts, translation issues, or the varying formats of interviews. 

The TRUEDEM codebook, collaboratively developed by the research teams, provides the analytical structure for coding and interpreting the interview data. It is organized hierarchically, beginning with major thematic categories and branching into more detailed subcodes. The principal themes include trust—encompassing general understandings, dynamics, and consequences—alongside democracy, where codes address models of democracy, legitimacy, accountability, and rule of law. Institutional references are covered at multiple levels, including national, local, and European bodies. Another section addresses media and communication, capturing discussions on traditional media, social media, information credibility, and public messaging. Civil society actors such as NGOs, trade unions, and grassroots movements form a distinct category, as do policy-specific discussions, including health, education, migration, and climate. Additional sections account for sentiments expressed by interviewees, types of social relationships, and the dynamics of the interview itself—such as hesitation, reframing, or positioning. Designed for use across linguistic and national contexts, the codebook supports both structured comparison and interpretive depth. 

In tandem with the codebook discussions, the meeting included extended hands-on sessions with NVivo software, which the consortium has adopted as its principal platform for collaborative coding. These sessions served both as training opportunities and as practical workshops for participants to explore how the software could support their analytical goals. The sessions helped establish a common baseline for usage and identified areas where additional support or standardization might be needed. Attention was also given to the collaborative dimensions of the platform, including how team members across institutions might share coding tasks, review one another’s work, and manage version control.

Beyond the technical and procedural aspects of qualitative analysis, the meeting also included more open-ended discussions about emerging themes and patterns within the data. A preliminary presentation of lexical analysis showed the prominence of certain terms—particularly “trust,” “people,” and “media”—across the dataset, prompting reflection on how these concepts were being deployed in different national and institutional settings. The discussion underscored both the potential and the limitations of purely lexical approaches, and several participants emphasized the need for context-sensitive readings that attend to the structure and tone of individual interviews.

The Grenoble meeting also provided a forum to begin coordinating plans for academic publications and public-facing outputs. Participants outlined ideas for comparative papers, thematic studies, and methodological contributions, and discussed how to align these with the project’s broader dissemination and policy engagement strategy. As part of this effort, attention was given to the documentation and reporting of project outputs to meet the European Commission’s requirements, including the need to ensure that all publications are properly recorded.

Finally, the meeting offered a useful occasion to revisit logistical and administrative matters related to the project timeline. Updates were given on the quantitative component of the project, financial reporting requirements, and the schedule for upcoming dissemination events, including potential conferences and public presentations.