The project used focus group research to involve local communities in understanding the impact of the Scottish Referendum on their Scottish/British identities, the future of Scotland post-referendum, and on the polity in Scotland and the UK. It provided an opportunity for the two campaigns, Better Together and Yes Scotland to publically reflect on the campaign itself, and the reasons for their success and failure. The dataset consists of five focus group transcripts, three of voters and two of activists, with pseudonoymized participant questionnaire responses, metadata, handouts and transcripts organized by theme (Heading 1) and participant alias (Heading 2). We also include the Participant Information Sheet given to Voters, Participant Information Sheet given to Activists, Consent Form, Focus group pre-group close-ended questionnaire, Leader Evaluations Handout and Focus group question schedule.The project used focus group research to involve local communities in understanding the impact of the Scottish Referendum on their Scottish/British identities, the future of Scotland post-referendum, and on the polity in Scotland and the UK. It provided an opportunity for the two campaigns, Better Together and Yes Scotland to publically reflect on the campaign itself, and the reasons for their success and failure. In bringing these two sources of information together we compared and contrasted these expert opinions with the voters they sought to win over.

Focus group participants were recruited through snowballing and internet based recruitment techniques from within and around Dundee. Dundee was chosen for the variation in the composition of the marginality of the constituencies within and near the city. It was also chosen as it was the only city in Scotland that voted overwhelmingly for independence. Based on a pre-selection questionnaire, participants were divided into five focus groups: those that voted Yes in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, those that voted No, and activists who actively campaigned for the Yes and No campaigns in the referendum. A total of 27 participants took part in the study. The audio of the focus groups were recorded and then transcribed. One participant, with the pseudonym 'Gloria' did not take part in the leaders evaluation exercise.