8/12/2009 1:44:49 PM By
E.J. Reedy
8/12/2009 12:12:21 PM By
E.J. Reedy
At the recent Academy of Management meetings, I was lucky enough to attend a Professional Development Workshop on "Business Creation Panel Studies: an International Overview." Most of the data presented was looking at the concept of nascent entrepreneurship, but the Australian and Latvian presentations also dealt with some other populations. There is a great deal of similarity among the different projects presented, as is apparent from the slides below; however, for a number of reasons the presenters seemed to feel that there was still room for international comparative research and perhaps, eventually, a harmonized data file.
One of the most interesting parts of sitting in on this session for me was hearing the experience of each principal investigator in gathering support for their project, dealing with vendors, getting data, and then analysis. Indeed, a couple of themes emerged across presenters which were of note on the pure logistics of organizing a panel survey. This is my own summary, not something which was presented at the event:
- Funding - Many of the organizers experienced exogenous shocks to their funding source in the course of carrying out the surveys. Even without shocks, most of the principal investigators talked about the expensive nature of panel data collection and the importance of securing funding early.
- Vendor - In all but one case, I believe, these panel surveys were collected using an outside vendor under direction from the academic principal investigator. While it was not the case for each country, more than half seemed to have had some pretty significant vendor issues during the process. Indeed several had switched vendors during the course of the panel data collection.
- Sample - In each case, I don't think the principal investigators ever felt they were able to truly get a large enough sample of nascent entrepreneurs. This is typically a function of cost and sheer difficulty of screening the adult population (or some other source) in order to find people in the process of starting a business.
So, with thanks to the presenters in this session for their gracious permission to post the slides to Data Maven, here in the order they presented are the slides from the workshop.
Business Creation Panel Studies: An International Status Report
Recent Overview Paper on Nascent Entrepreneurship
Per Davidsson and Scott R. Gordon
Australia
Canada
China
Latvia
Netherlands (Presented by Paul Reynolds)
Norway
Sweden
United States
Commentary
8/12/2009 11:18:21 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Back in July the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the U.S. Census Bureau hosted a two day seminar on turning statistics into knowledge. The PowerPoints and speakers from the event are
now available online for those wanting to explore data visualization or other aspects of making knowledge more approachable.
8/11/2009 5:04:12 PM By
E.J. Reedy
8/11/2009 11:38:07 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Scott Shane highlighted in his blog yesterday some interesting data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the University of California, Los Angeles, related to the interests of college freshmen in business. The CIRP Freshman Survey is part of a larger effort at CIRP to measure the college experience and something which caught my interest about a year ago, so I wanted to share more detail on the survey and some additional tabulation from it which will help researchers to see why there is some great potential here. In particular, this data set would seem ripe for some doctoral research, as CIRP is open to research proposals, and to my knowledge, very little has been done with this data looking at career choice.
From the
CIRP website...
The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey is administered by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA. Informing colleges and universities since 1966, the CIRP Freshman Survey has collected data on over 13 million students at over 1,900 institutions, and is the largest American study of higher education. The CIRP Freshman Survey is designed to provide comprehensive information on your incoming first-year students. It can be used by itself, or, when used in conjunction with the Your First College Year Survey (YFCY) and the College Senior Survey (CSS), provides valuable baseline data for a longitudinal assessment. The CIRP Freshman Survey is used by researchers and practitioners to examine readiness for college, how students choose colleges, student values and beliefs about diversity and civic engagement, and student expectations.
Participating institutions receive a detailed profile of their entering freshman class, as well as national normative data for students in similar types of institutions. These campus profile reports, together with the national normative profile, provide important data that can be useful in a variety of program and policy areas:
- Admissions and recruitment
- Academic program development, review and self-assessment
- Institutional self-study and accreditation activities
- Public relations and advancement/development
- Institutional research and assessment
- Retention studies
- Longitudinal research about the impact of policies and programs
Although the normative data provided with the institutional reports (and published annually in The American Freshman) are based on the population of first-time, full-time freshmen, participating institutions also receive separate reports for their part-time and transfer students. Additionally, participating campuses can obtain supplemental reports profiling students by various subgroups (for example, by intended major or career, by academic ability, by home state).
Now Scott's post highlighted the response to a question which reads as follows in the
2009 questionnaire, although the response categories have likely changed over the years.
Please indicate the importance to you personally of each of the following: (Mark one for each item)
Response categories - Essential, Very Important, Somewhat Important, Not Important
- Becoming accomplished in one of the performing arts (acting, dancing, etc.)..........................
- Becoming an authority in my field.........................................
- Obtaining recognition from my colleagues for contributions to my special field..........................................
- Influencing the political structure...........................................
- Influencing social values.......................................................
- Raising a family.....................................................................
- Being very well off financially................................................
- Helping others who are in difficulty.......................................
- Making a theoretical contribution to science.........................
- Writing original works (poems, novels, short stories, etc.)....
- Creating artistic works (painting, sculpture, decorating, etc.)..
- Becoming successful in a business of my own..................... [bold added]
- Becoming involved in programs to clean up the environment..
- Developing a meaningful philosophy of life...........................
- Participating in a community action program........................
- Helping to promote racial understanding..............................
- Keeping up to date with political affairs.................................
- Becoming a community leader..............................................
- Improving my understanding of other countries and cultures..
- Adopting “green” practices to protect the environment.........
What struck me most when I read Scott's summary of the data was the high level of response to the question. According to Scott's tabulations, the measure has run between 40 and 50 percent of college freshmen choosing either "essential" or "very important" to the choice "Becoming successful in a business of my own" since at least 1976, with the exception of a period of time in the 1990s.
In correspondence with
John Pryor, one of the directors on these projects at UCLA, I had looked at another measure which the Freshmen Survey appears to have related to entrepreneurship, specifically, their probable career choice. Here is the question from the 2009 survey:
Mark only three responses, one in each column [column headings - Your mother's occupation, Your father's occupation, Your probable occupation]
- Accountant or actuary.....................
- Actor or entertainer.........................
- Architect or urban planner...............
- Artist................................................
- Business (clerical)...........................
- Business executive (management, administrator)........
- Business owner or proprietor..........[bold added]
- Business salesperson or buyer.......
- Clergy (minister, priest)...................
- Clergy (other religious)....................
- Clinical psychologist........................
- College administrator/staff...............
- College teacher...............................
- Computer programmer or analyst...
- Conservationist or forester..............
- Dentist (including orthodontist)........
- Dietitian or nutritionist......................
- Engineer..........................................
- Farmer or rancher...........................
- Foreign service worker (including diplomat).......................
- Homemaker (full-time).....................
- Interior decorator (including designer)..
- Lab technician or hygienist..............
- Law enforcement officer..................
- Lawyer (attorney) or judge..............
- Military service (career)...................
- Musician (performer, composer)......
- Nurse...............................................
- Optometrist......................................
- Pharmacist......................................
- Physician.........................................
- Policymaker/Government................
- School counselor.............................
- School principal or superintendent..
- Scientific researcher........................
- Social, welfare, or recreation worker..
- Therapist (physical, occupational, speech)........................................
- Teacher or administrator (elementary).................................
- Teacher or administrator (secondary)..................................
- Veterinarian.....................................
- Writer or journalist...........................
- Skilled trades...................................
- Laborer (unskilled)...........................
- Semi-skilled worker.........................
- Unemployed....................................
- Other................................................
- Undecided.......................................
John and I had corresponded about his survey because
he presented a paper at the
2008 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data in which he highlighted the need from his perspective to update the occupation choices represented on the survey for a modern world. Indeed, in his paper he highlighted the following, "approximately 17 percent of incoming students cannot find a suitable occupation on the list and answer with 'other' (another 14 percent respond with 'undecided'). In 2008, approximately one out of five seniors answered 'other' for the probable career after graduation on the CSS."
In corresponding with John, he was nice enough to send me the time series for the answers to "Your probable occupation" that related to business ownership, which with his permission, I have included below.
With this response garnering between 1.6 and 3.7 percent over the course of the survey, it is at an extremely different level than the question Scott highlighted. Obviously, both are relevant, but more work needs to be done to understand and interact the responses on individual records. Indeed, if you are a researcher doing work with this data, please let me know. What I would hypothesize is the question Scott highlighted has more to do with interest at some point - a question polling firms have asked in the adult population at different times - while the question which I highlight is probably more akin to the nascent entrepreneurs or people who plan to start a business in the next few years. Now, this is only conjecture and there are other places in this survey where the idea of entrepreneurship would seem to appear, but the conclusions which we draw from the data can differ and should be investigated more. Indeed, the question which I highlight remains closer to historic highs than the question which Scott highlighted, but it should be noted that neither question is at a peak currently.
It will be interesting to see what the coming years of data show in these trends and what work can be done to improve measurement of entrepreneurship and innovation in the CIRP surveys. John Pryor also asked that I share this on the post: "HERI is interested in exploring the development of entrepreneurship (among other areas) with follow-up surveys of these students as they have been out in the working world." I believe John is referencing surveys like what is planned shortly on "becoming scientists" as listed on their website.
8/11/2009 10:28:06 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Alicia Robb, Denny Dennis, and I did a
Professional Development Workshop at the Academy of Management a couple of days ago. Here I am posting the slides from that workshop, which focused on data available for entrepreneurship research, along with notes from my comments at the event, which I had not put into slides.
Alicia Robb, Kauffman Foundation and University of California, Santa Cruz
Denny Dennis, NFIB
E.J. Reedy, Kauffman Foundation
Additionally, at the meeting, hard copies of the
proceedings of the 2007 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data were handed out. Additional copies were requested by some but
electronic versions of each paper are available on line. The
2008 proceedings, which focused on ideas for improving data are also available.
And lastly, we highlighted a few ways in which scholars could connect with Kauffman and other scholars in this area. There is this blog,
Data Maven, for tracking data developments. On Facebook, join the
Kauffman Entrepreneurship Scholars group. Subscribe to
entrepreneurship emails from Social Science Research Network. Or participate in
Kauffman's emerging scholars programs.
8/10/2009 6:10:54 PM By
E.J. Reedy
8/10/2009 5:46:35 PM By
E.J. Reedy
An article from the World Bank on measuring investor and consumer confidence:
This is not entrepreneurship or innovation but many scholars in our area look at topics which are touched by this topic and I can foresee that increasing.
8/10/2009 3:51:03 PM By
E.J. Reedy
I just got an email from
Tim Sturgeon at MIT which was quite encouraging. First, they have recently received notification from the National Science Foundation (NSF) recommending funding for the 2009 National Organizations Survey. While this is still some time away before researchers could use the data,
Tim and his co-principal investigators presented an overview of some of their plans in
November 2008 at the Kauffman Data Symposium. The issue of whether or not an entrepreneurship sample can be funded, as they propose, remains, and is something which this team is looking to Kauffman for. As such, I remain open to feedback on that portion of the proposal.
But outside of this, I wanted to highlight that apparently data collected in the Globalization Module of the 2008
General Social Survey will soon be available for analysis by application. The data will be posted to
NORC Data Enclave soon. They also have plans to make the National Organization Survey data available for scholarly use after collection. Kauffman sponsored a small
entrepreneurship module in the 2008 GSS, as well, which might be of interest.
8/10/2009 2:59:33 PM By
E.J. Reedy
Like most people in the United States right now, I am a bit overwhelmed by the health care debate. It's such a complex issue and it is moving so quickly that for the last month I have largely tuned out the details. But today, I was reading a story from the
Los Angeles Times that caught my attention because it had some interesting details on the benefits offered by small firms. So, I followed the sources and ended up at the
2008 Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust Employer Health Benefits Annual Survey. While I am still pouring over the results, there were a couple of things about this survey which I found interesting. It's not a survey which researchers can access microdata but I think the survey still has a lot of good material.
The first thing that struck me was this chart:
What this would seem to imply is that it is not necessarily the incidence of small firms offering health insurance which differs from large firms but rather it is the details of the plans which are offered which can vary significantly.
On the
methodology section of the report, I thought their adjustments this year to get additional survey response might be useful for others doing work in this area or just conceptually for those trying to raise their response rates.
The Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust 2008 Annual Employer Health Benefits Survey (Kaiser/HRET) reports findings from a telephone survey of 1,927 randomly selected public and private employers with three or more workers. Researchers at the Health Research & Educational Trust, the National Opinion Research Center at The University of Chicago, and the Kaiser Family Foundation designed and analyzed the survey. National Research, LLC conducted the fieldwork between January and May 2008. In 2008 our overall response rate is 48%, which includes firms that offer and do not offer health benefits. Among firms that offer health benefits, the survey’s response rate is 50%.
From previous years’ experience, we have learned that firms that decline to participate in the study are less likely to offer health coverage. Therefore, we asked one question of all firms with which we made phone contact where the firm declined to participate. The question was, “Does your company offer or contribute to a health insurance program as a benefit to your employees?” A total of 2,832 firms responded to this question (including 1,927 who responded to the full survey and 905 who responded to this one question). Their responses are included in our estimates of the percentage of firms offering health coverage. The response rate for this question was 71%. Since firms are selected randomly, it is possible to extrapolate from the sample to national, regional, industry, and firm size estimates using statistical weights. In calculating weights, we first determined the basic weight, then applied a nonresponse adjustment, and finally applied a post-stratification adjustment. We used the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses as the basis for the stratification and the post-stratification adjustment for firms in the private sector, and we used the Census of Governments as the basis for post-stratification for firms in the public sector. Some exhibits in the report do not sum to totals due to rounding effects and, in a few cases, numbers from distribution exhibits referenced in the text may not add due to rounding effects.
Read
more from the methodology. Get
historical surveys. I was trying to find a copy of the actual questionnaire used but didn't have any luck. If someone has or can point me to the link, I'd appreciate.