Üniversite Öğrencilerine Yönelik Girişimcilik Ölçeğinin Geliştirilmesi

Gönümüzde bireylerin, girişimcilikleri büyük önem kazanmıştır. Girişimcilik; emek, teknoloji, sermaye ve doğal kaynaklar olarak sayılan üretim faktörlerini bir araya getirerek mal veya hizmet üretme eylemlerini kapsar. Girişimci ise; mal ve hizmet üretmek amacıyla, pazardaki fırsatlarıdeğerlendiren, sermaye, doğal kaynaklar ve emek gibi üretim faktörlerini bir araya getirerek riski üstlenen kişidir. Bu araştırmanıamacı, üniversite öğrencilerinin girişimciliklerini ölçebilecek güvenilir ve geçerli bir ölçme aracıgeliştirmektir. Araştırmanın çalışma grubunu Selçuk Üniversitesinin farklıbölümlerinde okuyan 474 öğrenci oluşturmuştur. Ölçeğin yapıgeçerliliğine ilişkin bulgular faktör analizi yöntemi ile sağlanmıştır. Temel bileşenler analizlerine dayalıolarak ölçeğin maddelerinin tek bir faktörde boyutta toplandığıgörülmüştür. Ölçeğin güvenirliğine ilişkin bulgular Cronbach alfa İç tutarlılık ile sağlanmıştır. Bulgular ölçeğin iç tutarlılığına ilişkin güvenirlik katsayısının yeterli düzeyde olduğunu ortaya koymuştur. Ölçek toplam puanlarında, öğrencilerin cinsiyet değişkenine göre manidar farklar bulunamamıştır.

Introduction: Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. Entrepreneurship is often difficult and tricky, resulting in many new ventures failing. The word entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service, by carving out a niche in the market that may not exist currently. Entrepreneurs tend to identify a market opportunity and exploit it by organizing their resources effectively to accomplish an outcome that changes existing interactions within a given sector. Entrepreneurship of the individuals have come into prominence today. Entrepreneurship includes production of good and services through bringing together the production factors such as labor, technology, capital, and natural resources. Entrepreneur is the one who seizes the opportunities and takes risks by bringing the production factors such as capital, natural resources and labor together to produce goods and services. Entrepreneurship is enunciatively of defending ourselves, having self confidence, expressing our feelings honestly and comfortably, and taking advantage of our own rights in a manner free of unnecessary anxiety by protecting equality in human relations. Recent years have witnessed a well-documented surge in entrepreneurship as a research theme. There is also wide acceptance of the legitimatization of entrepreneurship as an area of academic and research inquiry, on one hand, claims that research in entrepreneurship is fun and fascinating because of the richness of entrepreneurship that spans many disciplinary areas, theoretical perspectives and methodologies. It is, on the other hand, frustrating, as there is a lack of common understanding about entrepreneurship. As a result, although the field has been studied extensively and empirically, entrepreneurship research has been criticized because there is little consensus about the definitions of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. Universities need to provide a conducive learning and creative entrepreneurial environment in order to ‘see’ entrepreneurially-inclined individuals, since the environment can support entrepreneurial activity. In brief, in order to encourage and nurture entrepreneurially-inclined students, students need to be continuously exposed to entrepreneurial competencies and skills to recognize untapped business opportunities. Aims: The purpose of the study is to develop a valid and reliable instrument about entrepreneurship of university students. Methods: A self-administered survey method through questionnaires was employed to collect Data. This study was conducted with 474 students from various departments of Selçuk University who were chosen by stratified sampling. Of the 474 subjects, 119 were males while 355 were females. The questionnaires were distributed to groups of students using a random sample of classes during the normal lecture sessions. The instrument development studies were composed of the preparation of the items, having expert views about the items for the scope validity, pilot study, the analysis of construct validity and reliability. Descriptive analysis, factor analysis, Cronbach Alpha, Correlation techniques, and independent sample t-test were used to test the research aims. A questionnaire of 43 items for measuring university students’ entrepreneurship was prepared using a Likert five- point scale. After all the questionnaires were collected, they were coded for data entry into SPSS 16.0. Prior to entering the data, all the questionnaires returned by the respondents were strictly checked and filtered. Findings: The validity of content-scope was examined to determine the validity of scale and the number of items was reduced to 36 items. The validity structure of the scale was examined with factor analysis. Factor analysis is a generic name assigned to a group of multivariate statistical methods, the main purpose of which is to reduce the large number of underlying variables into a smaller or manageable set of factors. It is often used for investigating construct validity. Generally, there are several steps involved in factor analysis. The first step is assessing factorability of the data. To do this, two main criteria are used: i Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin KMO value with more than 0.5 or greater should be considered satisfactory to perform the factor analysis; and ii if Bartlett’s test of sphericity BTS is significant, the factor analysis can be performed. The second step is the extraction of factors. To decide the number of factors to be retained, a screed plot is used while rotation is used to ensure meaningful factors. On the research, the results of KMO analysis and that of Barlett’s test were found as 0,79 and 3482,21 respectively. Both the test results were found significant at the level of importance p=0,01 he data were factor analyzed, using Principal Component Analysis with Varimax Rotation. The factor analysis of the questionnaire responses resulted in 36 items loading values greater than .40 which loaded on one factor. Correlation technique has been used to explain the relationship between boldness and entrepreneurship levels of the students. The validity coefficient between Entrepreneurship Scale and Rathus Assertiveness Inventory for Adolescents developed by Acar is 0.33. Internal consistency application was carried out to determine the validity of the scale. Total item- point correlation was determined between 0,40-0,66 and were found significant at the level of importance p=0,01 Cronbach Alpha coefficient was of found to be α=0,90. The results of the study suggested a significant relationship between assertiveness and entrepreneurship levels of the students. Assertiveness levels of the students significantly predict their entrepreneurship levels. Besides, it hasn’t been found a significant relation between entrepreneurship and gender whereas it has been found relation between assertiveness. Conclusion: These results suggest that the 36-item scale for university students is a reliable and valid measure tapping a single underlying component. We advocate further research to find out the validity of the scale among individuals from different socioeconomic and education settings. Finally, as this study examines university students’ towards entrepreneurship, it may provide useful practical information to university policy. Makers in making more informed decisions on entrepreneurship programmes in order to increase students’ participation in business in the future. The education stakeholders such as government and universities will also have a better understanding of the factors that influence students’ entrepreneurial qualifications. The outcomes from this research are expected to have policy implications for the future development of entrepreneurship programmes for young people, especially students at universities