Professor Daniel Briggs

I am an experienced researcher, writer and inter-disciplinary academic who combines ethnographic methods (observation, interviewing) with behavioural analysis and data-driven insights to study social problems. Drawing on over 25 years of immersive fieldwork, I translate complex human behaviours and lived experiences into actionable understanding — working across the boundaries of in depth qualitative and quantitative pattern to reveal what numbers alone cannot capture.

Over the same 25 years, I have built deep expertise in behavioural and data insights — designing and delivering research that helps organisations, policymakers and practitioners understand why people think, feel and act as they do, and what that means for intervention, strategy and change.

My research subjects have included homeless drug users, terminally-ill patients, refugees, sex workers, Gypsies, gang members, young offenders, political activists, protestors, economic migrants, and have also spent the last decade researching tourist behaviours across Spain. Across these communities, I have developed a distinctive methodology: using close observation and testimony to surface the behavioural drivers, social dynamics and systemic pressures that shape human decision-making.

One of my books, Dead End Lives: Drugs and Violence in the City Shadows (2017, Policy Press), won the Division of International Criminology's Outstanding Book Award 2018 (selected by the American Society of Criminology). Other monographs include Climate Changed: Refugee Border Stories and the Business of Misery (2020, Routledge) and Hotel Puta: A Hardcore Ethnography of a Luxury Brothel (2022, RJ4All Publications).

I am also the lead co-author of Researching the Covid-19 Pandemic (2021, Bristol University Press) and Lockdown: Social Harm in the Covid-19 Era (2021, Palgrave). I have just published Sheltering Strangers: Critical Memoirs of Hosting Ukrainian Refugees (2025, Policy Press) and have co-edited The Lost: Life, Loss and Legacy in Criminology (2026, Bristol University Press).

My current research applies behavioural and data insight frameworks to two contrasting worlds: the ultra-high-net-worth luxury yacht industry and low-income patients navigating medical tourism for weight-loss surgery abroad — examining how desire, risk perception and economic calculation shape behaviour across vastly different social strata.