Role of research in defining perceptions about refugees in europe

Currently we are experiencing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. There are over 22 million refugees in the world. And the largest group of five million are refugees from Syria.
There is also a decrease in willingness to help refugees across the world. A clear example would be Brexit. This is one of the reasons why we chose to focus on the UK population in our study.
In our study we targeted two different groups that we believe have the biggest potential to being able to change their perceptions and to start taking action:
• People that do not welcome refugees in the UK, but are willing to learn more about the crisis. (Attitudinal group)
• People that welcome refugees in the UK, but currently do not take any action (e.g. donation, volunteering etc.). (Behavioural group)

This is what we learned
Our study identified three key barriers per group and we created three different types of stimuli for each barrier to test the effectiveness of each. Some of our key findings:
The first and most important finding is that we can change people’s perception and drive positive action. However, one message doesn’t fit all. Personalised messages have the largest impact on people’s perceptions, compared to more generic stories.
Furthermore, there is a need to educate people about who refugees actually are. We found that the difference between refugees and economic migrants is not clear to everyone.
Another rather simple way to increase the chances of people taking action is to inform them about the different ways you can contribute to helping refugees (e.g. donating clothes, volunteering etc.).
Despite the complex and challenging nature of this research, we were able to identify that only by understanding people’s mindset, and using targeted messaging, can we tackle barriers and persuade people to take action.
Going forwards, we feel there is an opportunity to implement our findings in reality and to extend our research in other countries.

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