Challenges in collecting documentary evidence: an exploration of Academic Entrepreneurship in Bangladesh

Qualitative researchers face unique opportunities and challenges due to the disruption of Covid-19. Although the pandemic represents a unique opportunity to study the crisis because of social distancing, many researchers working on research projects unrelated to the Covid-19 forced to transition from face-to-face data collection to some other form. This article aims to reflect on our experience conducting a qualitative study based on challenges in collecting documentary evidence and ways to overcome them in association with understanding academic entrepreneurship (AE) in Bangladesh. We have adopted the neo-empiricist theoretical perspective to collect this documentary evidence. Neo-empiricism allows us to look at these documents objectively without considering creators’ inter-subjectivity. Despite this, it is important to consider flexibility and goal orientation while collecting the documents. We found that by applying objectivity, we can reduce several challenges. We used Lee’s (2021) systematic process to collect documentary evidence where there are no national repositories and identified and analysed several documents accordingly.