Qualitative research into how street protests are performed and framed, especially across multiple events within a set time and geographic space, requires detailed data on past protests that is tantamount to documentary reconstruction. Whereas there are various ways to qualitatively reconstruct a single or a few protest events, the options are limited for a larger number of protests, e.g. dozens or even hundreds.

Protest event data (e.g. ACLED, PolDem) designed for PEA’s quantitative analysis cannot provide the depth required for qualitative inquiry. In-depth interviews of protesters and organizers, protest surveys, and video data analysis (VDA) are useful to explore a single protest or a handful of events, but without an eyewatering amount of funds and many research personnel, these methods cannot be sufficiently scaled to dozens or hundreds of them. Moreover, methods based on interviews of participants are best collected either during the protest event or very soon after; time’s passage renders memory an unreliable source to accurately reconstruct a past event. VDA appropriately captures the moment and minute details and thus serves as a meaningful ethnographic window into the event; but it is an extremely time-consuming process best used, as it usually is, to analyze situational dynamics of a single protest.

To usefully fill the gap, we present a relatively low-cost, scalable, and replicable method called Protest Event Reports (PERs).

In this multimodal qualitative approach based on local mainstream news media, we integrate text and audiovisual materials such as photos, video, and audio to document actors, actions, interactions, demands, reasons, and places. PERs use multiple news sources and multimodality to contend with news bias and make it possible to qualitatively analyze across a larger number of cases than is typically feasible with interviews or ethnographic approaches, while complementing them.

You can read and download our methodology paper FREE at SSRN:

Dubrow, Joshua and Radiukiewicz, Anna and Zukowski, Alan and Nawrocki, Michal, Protest Event Reports (PERs): A Method to Reconstruct Street Protest Events for Qualitative Analysis (April 16, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6965398 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6965398

Acknowledgements: We thank the participants of the conference, Empirical Research on Protests and Social Movements in Central and Eastern Europe: State of the Art, at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), December 2025, for the helpful comments. This paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Centre, Poland
(2021/43/B/HS6/01155).