Nour is a Syrian refugee who has lived in Scotland for the past five years.
Her family owned a store in Syria, and she is considering opening a small business in Scotland after her studies. After taking English classes for two years with the local Help Centre for Refugees, she was able to resume her studies and is now a master’s student in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She has looked at the academic literature and found that the specific challenges refugees face when setting up a business in their host country are under-researched (Embiricos 2020;
Alrawadieh et al. 2019). So, for her final year research project, she is asking: ‘What are the main challenges faced by refugees in the process of setting up a business and how are they overcome?’. To answer this research question, she has chosen to look at the experiences of entrepreneurs who have been granted refugee status in the UK in the last five years.
To collect data, Nour has started with the local Help Centre for Refugees because she has heard about their collection of success stories of refugees who opened a business in the last two years. As a community member, she has been granted access to the transcripts of seven structured interviews that had been conducted. During a discussion with the local Help Centre’s employee who conducted these interviews, she has discovered that this initiative was triggered by the launch of an open archive for refugees. The Refugee Council initiated this virtual platform for archiving refugees’ stories. On this archive, one area is dedicated to narrative accounts of refugees who have managed to set up a business. The stories are available to the public on a read-only basis.
Searching for more secondary data, Nour has found a variety of publications relating to refugee entrepreneurship and the benefits for refugees of starting their own business. These are on websites such as the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency), the World Economic Forum, the British Red Cross and newspapers.
Data sets collected by someone other than the researcher can offer many advantages (Johnston, 2017). However, Nour realised that the amount of data she had available was considerable and did not know how to proceed. She met with Edwin, her tutor, who asked her the following questions:
• Did you evaluate the sources of the secondary data you found?
• Do you know how these data were collected?
• Do you know from whom these data were collected?

Following this meeting with her tutor, Nour re-evaluated her secondary data. Talking to the interviewer at the Help Centre for Refugees, she established how the interviews had been conducted.
Ten open questions were asked in the same order to all interviewees, including one on the specific difficulties encountered in setting up a business as a refugee. Nour believed that these data would provide information to answer her research question. Discovering that the interviewer followed general guidelines for structured interviewing, she assessed this source as reliable. She then looked at the criteria for uploading content on the Refugee Council’s platform.
Any refugee or organisation working for refugees in the UK could upload a story in text, audio or video format after registering on the website by following simple instructions (e.g.
length of text). Nour tried to register and saw that the Refugee Council asked for demographic information, contact details and the date refugee status was granted. Since the organisation was well known and the criteria for collecting the data were clear and accessible, Nour considered the repository a reliable source. Nour thought that she now probably had sufficient data to answer her research question and chose to disregard additional sources she had previously identified.

To support her analysis process, Edwin suggested that Nour use CAQDAS (Computer Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software), such as NVivo or ATLAS.ti, and upload the interview transcripts and narrative accounts in text, audio or video format. Nour could then follow a thematic analysis to examine these secondary data, i.e. she coded the data to identify the themes that reflect the main challenges refugees face and ways to overcome them in setting up a business in the UK. Nour recognised these data had been collected for a different purpose than to answer her research question. Indeed, part of the data was unlikely to help her to answer her research question directly. However, she considered these data would offer a contextual understanding of these refugees’ experiences and that in telling their stories, they mostly shared their struggles. Those who did not mention any challenges could be excluded from her study.
On reflection, Nour concluded that, although she did not collect the data herself, she was able to understand the experiences of other refugees setting up a business. She believed that those whose stories she read or heard had probably opened up as much as they did in their stories because they told them on their own terms.

Questions 

1 What type of secondary data did Nour use for this study?
2 Nour’s tutor, Edwin, raised an important issue when he asked Nour to evaluate the secondary data sources. Do you think that Nour properly evaluated the potential sources of the secondary data she had found?
3 a. Think about the disadvantages of using secondary data. What are the specific ones in this case?

b. Do you think that it would have been appropriate for Nour to collect primary data in addition to the secondary data she found?
4 What are the advantages of using secondary data you have identified?

Transcribed Image Text:

Nour created the following table to summarise her secondary data sources. Source Local Help Centre for Refugees Number of documents Type of document Interview transcript 7 Refugee Council repository Text 38 Refugee Council repository Audio file 12 Refugee Council repository Video file 26