Qualitative survey on Ukrainian entrepreneurs in Kraków (2018)

Qualitative survey with 32 Ukrainian entrepreneurs conducted in Kraków, Poland (2018) A semi-structured interview protocol (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was developed in February 2018, featuring 45 questions designed to explore migrants’ entrepreneurial activities in the host country. Interviews prompted respondents to reconstruct their entrepreneurial trajectories retrospectively, enabling us to map shifts, layering, or abandonment of logics across time. Topics included the role of family and friends, prior entrepreneurial experience, educational background, integration, perceived obstacles, support needs, and the ethnic composition of partners and clients. To ensure clarity and comprehensibility, the protocol was pre-tested with a manager not included in the sample (Yin, 2009) and refined based on feedback (Van Teijlingen et al., 2021). The interviews (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007) took place between April and August 2018, several years before Russia's full-scale intervention in Ukraine, among Ukrainian entrepreneurs residing in Poland. The participants included retail kiosks, IT outsourcing teams, B2B suppliers, and cross-border staffing agencies. We applied two main criteria for interviewee selection: participants had to be of Ukrainian origin (i.e., foreign-born) and have ongoing or recent entrepreneurial experience in Kraków, the second-largest Polish metropolitan area in southern Poland. We have cooperated with the Polish-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce (PUCC), a transnational business organization that connects entrepreneurs in Poland and Ukraine. The reason for choosing PUCC as a partner was guided by its experience in providing support for EI for Ukrainians willing to open a business in Poland. The data collection was conducted using the snowballing method (Goodman, 1961), and PUCC provided the initial seeds; the remaining respondents were reached through the recommendations of previous interviewees. The choice of Kraków was primarily guided by the large Ukrainian diaspora presence in the city, as well as its relative geographical proximity. Kraków is linked to Medyka on the Polish-Ukrainian border via a highway, allowing for a 3-hour border crossing. To complement our data, a few interviews were conducted with individuals operating outside of Kraków, either permanently or temporarily, but with connections to the city through the PUCC. The majority of the interviews were conducted offline, during face-to-face meetings with the interviewees. Some others were done using video online communicators (Skype). Each interview lasted between 45 minutes and 120 minutes and was conducted online via Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and translated from Italian into English (Bryman & Bell, 2022; Seidman, 2013). When clarification was needed, follow-up questions were sent via email or phone. We ceased data collection once we reached theoretical saturation (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Interviews were conducted by two research assistants, whose work was supervised by one member of the original research team, who was involved in the first interviews and provided guidance and feedback throughout the process. Many respondents spoke Polish quite well, but there were also others who were not fluent in the host country's language. For that reason, one of the research assistants interviewed the entrepreneurs in Polish, while the other one interviewed them in Russian or Ukrainian. The choice of language for the interview was made by respondents, and then the research assistant was sent to conduct the interview. The interviews had been recorded, transcribed, and then translated into English. In this process, the transcriptions had been checked for language consistency by the research team.