The explanatory variable of interest is an index of interaction with the outgroup. The index is constructed by aggregating the variables quantifying the number of times respondents i) shared meals, ii) had conversations, and iii) had business exchanges with someone in the outgroup in the past month. We winsorize the sum of the three variables to limit the influence of outliers and standardise the index to facilitate interpretation.<sup>9</sup> Summary statistics of all variables used in this analysis are presented in Tables A.3-A.4 in the Appendix.

# **4.2 Qualitative Data**

Our quantitative research is complemented by in-depth qualitative research across all research sites. As we put particular emphasis on capturing the voices of both refugees and local hosts and their subjective views, the main qualitative method we used was interviewing. From 2016 to 2019, we conducted more than 600 interviews across the three countries. In addition, in order to triangulate the information and to obtain different perspectives, we interviewed non-refugee stakeholders including staff members of relevant UN agencies and NGOs, and local and national government officials in charge of refugee community affairs. In each research site, our qualitative data collection was systematically implemented through following sequencing. First, in order to nurture a good contextual understanding, we began our data collection by discussing with key informants, such as refugees who are in leadership positions (even in cities, there exist some forms of community representation systems of refugees) and members of local host representatives who have been living in a research site for a long time. At this stage, we mainly drew upon one-to-one unstructured interviews with open-ended questions. This step enabled us to attain a broad understanding of the lives of refugees and host communities and the relationships between them in each site and also contributed to inform the designing of survey questionnaires based on local contexts. Second, we shifted to semi-structured individual interviews and focus group discussions with more specific questions on themes which had emerged during the initial interviews with key informants. This allowed us to deepen our understanding of refugee-host relationships in each of the research sites. The main purpose of our qualitative research is not to make generalizations of findings. However, to minimise the influence of specific groups in findings, we endeavoured to include various groups of refugees (and hosts to some degree), notably those from different genders, ethnicities, and age groups (the qualitative methods used and a breakdown of participants is detailed in Table A.6 in the Appendix). The analytical procedure of qualitative data is as follows. First, all of the conducted interviews were transcribed by the interviewer, who is in charge of qualitative research of the project, from the field notes. Next, each interview data was reviewed and explored by the researcher to identify repeated ideas or topics which are broadly related to the interactions/contacts/perceptions between refugees and hosts. Then, based on the initial identification of ideas and topics,

> 9Higher values of the index indicate more interaction with the outgroup. A one standard deviation change in the index corresponds to about 10-15 more direct interactions in the past month (the number varies slightly depending on the sample considered, as shown in Tables A.3-A.4 in the Appendix).

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