Context-Specific Entrepreneurial Environment Scale: A Psychometric Analysis
Abstract
The entrepreneurial environment has a big impact on their reasons for starting their own business. Given the Philippines’ growing emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation, a growing number of the population have started a journey of entrepreneurship and self-employment. Despite several existing questionnaires on the entrepreneurial environment, a valid and reliable scale that is customized in the context of Ifugao entrepreneurship students is yet to be developed and validated addressing the gap in localized entrepreneurial studies. Thus, this study aims to analyze the validated psychometric characteristics of a reduced version of the Questionnaire to Evaluate the Entrepreneurial Environment affecting the propensity of entrepreneurial activity among Ifugao entrepreneurship students. The instrument has a total of 25 items with a factor design structure of five latent factors obtained on well-developed and already-validated indicator systems from previous literature. The factors are Socioeconomic conditions, Financial Support, Government Policies, Non-Financial Support, and Education and Training. The questionnaire was administered to a sample of 133 students in Alfonso Lista, Ifugao, Philippines. Initially, data were analyzed through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), by using the partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using SPSS was performed to validate the results. The study's results showed that there were 24 items in total over 5 subscales. The scale demonstrated acceptable convergent validity, as evidenced by the average variance extracted (AVE) of each variable being greater than 0.5. The correlation coefficient between each variable and the others was less than the square roots of the AVE for each variable. This demonstrated that the discriminant validity of the measure was adequate. All the composite reliability (CR) scores were higher than 0.7, suggesting that the scale's reliability was adequate. Lastly, the reliability, as determined by Cronbach's alpha, has an overall value of more than 0.90 (α = 0.905). Results imply that the entrepreneurial environment scale can serve as a valuable tool for measuring the entrepreneurial environment and making strategic decisions for future entrepreneurs.
Keywords
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.11591/edulearn.v20i3.24165
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