King's College London

A new study authored by academics at King’s College London examined the lived experiences of people in Britain during the cost of living crisis, carrying out interviews with participants and asking people to record their experiences at the height of the crisis.

Researchers also organised sessions in which people were provided with detailed information about the crisis and then encouraged to formulate possible solutions.

Their work shed new light on the strategies used by people in response to the crisis and the challenges they face, the rapidly changing factors that shape financial hardship and people’s preferences for action to tackle the underlying causes.

The research team said: “The inclusion of lived experience, of the voices of ordinary people struggling to cope with rising costs, touches on an issue that is important to both the literature on resilience and the ways in which the UK government responded.

“Our research involved participants engaging in an active process of deliberation over the nature of the cost-of-living crisis and varying means to address it. In doing so, they demonstrated the importance of being treated not as passive victims of the crisis, but as actors with agency, who are able to learn, inform and ultimately, articulate possible responses in ways that otherwise would have been missed entirely.

“If resilience does in fact require treating those affected as having agency, then it is important to amplify their voices.”

The study was co-authored by Rod Dacombe and Marta Wojciechowska, from the Department of Political Economy at King’s, with Tianne Haggar, Suzanne Hall and Hannah Piggot from the Policy Institute.

For the study, researchers surveyed thousands of people across Britain in November 2022 and between June–July 2023, at the height of the cost of living crisis. They also worked with a group of ‘peer researchers’ in the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark and Westminster, gathering details about their daily experiences through interview, diary entries, videos and other media.

The research team also conducted three deliberative workshops with more than 30 residents in the same three London boroughs across autumn and winter 2022–2023, affording attendees the chance to work on their own policy solutions to the crisis.