On 9 April, PhD candidate Adrienn Győry presented her research findings to a group of policy experts at the Department of Planning and Strategy in the City Government of Oslo. The department had invited her and Dr Trude Sundberg to give an overview of welfare attitudes and immigration, and more specifically to provide new knowledge found in Adrienn’s research, where she uses the deliberative method of democratic forums to analyse attitudes to immigrants’ access to welfare benefits in Norway and the UK.
Dr Sundberg gave a general overview of the current trends in welfare attitude research across Europe. Following discussion on welfare attitudes, Adrienn presented her research findings, focusing primarily on the democratic forum conducted in Oslo in 2015 as part of the Welfare State Futures – Our Children’s Europe research project. In the presentation, she highlighted that analysing attitudes through social interaction sheds light on how ordinary people understand the issue of immigration, how they differentiate between specific groups of immigrants and what considerations shape their views on immigrants’ access to welfare benefits. It was argued that a better understanding of the reasons driving attitudes can inform policy planning and help improve policy communication to better cope with the rise of right-wing populism and support for welfare chauvinism. The presentation stressed the need for more qualitative research and how these research findings can contribute to a refinement of the quantitative measurement of attitudes.