LIVEWHAT aimed to provide evidence-based knowledge about citizens’ resilience in times of economic crises allowing for more effective policy responses to the negative consequences of such crises. It examined the ways in which European citizens reacted to the crisis that, with different degrees of intensity, struck European countries since 2008. Furthermore, the project also looked at how they deal with economic crises and their consequences more generally. While the focus of the research was on citizens’ responses (individual and collective), LIVEWHAT also examined policy responses as a baseline for assessing citizens’ resilience in times of crisis. Attention was focused on a broad range of coping strategies (not) used by European citizens in relation to the impact of the crisis, policy responses to the crisis, public discourses about the crisis, and the individual characteristics of those who are hit by the crisis. The project’s comparative perspective allows taking into consideration contextual factors at the national level for nine European countries namely France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. In particular, a large cross-national comparison of this kind helps to consider relevant variations in terms of both the scope of the economic crisis and the national characteristics of the institutional system. The data collection consists of both observational as well as experimental data.
