Interviews with Four Ex-Conspiracy Theorists on Entry and Exit from Online Communities

A 618.4 KB PDF contains qualitative interview data from four ex-conspiracy theorists. The study, authored by Chanais Matthias and uploaded to figshare in 2026, uses Reflective Thematic Analysis to identify four main themes and eight subthemes related to entering and leaving conspiracy communities.

Use Cases

• Train NLP models to identify themes of loneliness and life events in personal narratives based on the described thematic analysis.
• Analyze discourse patterns related to scientific literacy and misunderstanding of the scientific process mentioned in the description.
• Study the role of online community dynamics in reinforcing identity and creating barriers to exit as described in the interview findings.

Strengths

• Data is openly available under a CC-BY-4.0 license.
• The description details a specific analytical method (Reflective Thematic Analysis) and identifies four main themes.

Limitations

• The dataset is small, consisting of interviews with only four participants.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Qualitative interviews conducted under an interpretivist framework.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-28 18:16:33; freshness should be verified.