Measuring Entrepreneurial Intention of the Educated Youth in Sri Lanka: The Scientific Scale Development and Validation

Abstract

This study investigates the entrepreneurial intention of educated youth for self-employment. In entrepreneurial studies, we identify that adequate measurement of abstract constructs are a necessity to widen the understanding of the various stages in a scale. With this study, researchers introduce a three phase SMART approach to develop and validate a scale to measure the entrepreneurial intention. Our study sample comprised of undergraduates who completed their studies in 2017, 2018, and 2019 from five state-owned national universities in Sri Lanka. In order to minimize the margin error of 5percent, 740 commerce and management undergraduates were selected for the survey via multi-level mixed methods. Based on the sample 441 effective responses the analysis is performed by descriptive and inferential statistics using SPSS version 23 and SEM Amos 23. Prior to the analysis, we verified the psychometric properties of the scales and model fitness. Consistent with earlier research, we found that scientific scale development (SSD) procedure could be adapted to confirm the seven key factors that influence entrepreneurial intention based on theoretical and empirical review. The discussions are presented with suggestions and recommendations for future scholars, highlighting the need of effective scale development and validity measures in entrepreneurial intention for self-employment.