Since arriving at university, Ishmael had become increasingly interested in Small Businesses. He had taken all the

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Question:

Since arriving at university, Ishmael had become increasingly interested in Small Businesses. He had taken all the modules concerned with Small Businesses and Entrepreneurship and chosen to answer a question about small business owner managers for his research project:

“How important do small business owner managers consider the different skill sets needed to run a small business and why?”

Although the project tutor had felt Ishmael’s question needed more refinement and suggested he needed to read widely before collecting any data, Ishmael was pleased with his research question and his method. During his reading to prepare his research proposal he had come across a paper by Brown et al. (2006) in the journal Accounting Forum. This included, as an appendix, the questions Brown and colleagues had asked small business managers in their questionnaire. He had decided to adapt some of these questions for his own Internet mediated questionnaire that he administered to small business managers including:

Source: Question layout created by SurveyMonkey.com (2008), Portland, Oregon, USA; Author/Owner: Ryan Finley. Reproduced with permission

In his initial analysis Ishmael used SPSS to produce a set of descriptive statistics for each of his questions. For questions three and four these were:

He then decided to see if his respondents’ perceived confidence in their own skills was related to their perceived importance for each of these skills. Because Ishmael was uncertain as to which statistics to use to examine possible relationships, he used SPSS to both calculate correlation coefficients and to undertake a series of chi square tests:

Ishmael showed a friend his questionnaire and the SPSS output from his preliminary analysis relating to questions three and four. Over a cup of coffee he asked for advice regarding the analysis of his data. In the subsequent discussion Ishmael emphasised that, as part of the assessment criteria for his research project, he would need to explain why he had chosen to use particular statistics and diagrams.

Questions

Ishmael appears uncertain regarding his choice of statistics (the mean and standard deviation) in the first table to describe the responses to questions three and four.
1. How would you advise him?
2. What diagrams would you suggest Ishmael uses to present the data from these questions?
Examine the remaining two extracts reporting correlation coefficients and chi square tests. Should Ishmael use either the Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficients or the chi square tests as reported in these extracts?
Ishmael has decided to undertake further statistical analyses to see if there is any relationship between his respondents’ perceived confidence in their own skills and their perceived importance for the same set of skills. Outline the analysis process you would recommend including, if necessary, any further work that might be needed to satisfy your chosen test’s assumptions.