Tracing anxious lives: a biographical-narrative toolkit for anxieties and coping strategies in three central and eastern European countries.

Studying anxieties and coping strategies as broad, interrelated phenomena is methodologically demanding, especially in international, multilingual research. These experiences emerge across everyday domains-including health, family, and the environment-while linguistic and contextual differences further complicate comparison. We address this limitation through biographical-narrative interviews that situate anxieties and coping strategies within individual life courses. The approach elicits detailed accounts of personal histories, with particular attention to environmental anxieties and how participants have navigated them. The method deliberately situates environmental anxieties alongside other general anxieties reported by participants. This enables researchers to examine environmental anxieties in relation to competing anxieties and may help mitigate single-issue bias. It also generates more context-sensitive findings for policy and practice because environmental anxieties rarely occur in isolation. This article presents a Biographical-Narrative Toolkit for studying anxieties and coping strategies, developed and applied in comparative research conducted in Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary. The toolkit offers a transferable framework for future studies of anxiety and coping, while also providing methodological inspiration for research beyond this field.•Multistage codebook development, standardized coder training, paired review, and cross-country code harmonization support consistent code interpretation and qualitative comparability.•A systematic procedure inspired by quantitative research helps manage interpretation in large, international qualitative research teams.