Because of the variation in the nature of categories of small businesses,
Pathfinder Marketing Services determined that a single survey instrument
for all types of small businesses would not be appropriate. The differences
that exist for program needs across the five industries would force
a single instrument to be so general that the corresponding findings
would be of limited strategic value. As a result, a separate questionnaire
was developed for each of the five major categories of small businesses.
Members of the Strategic Planning Committee were extremely helpful in
the determination of possible areas of program interest for each of
the five industry groups. After the five questionnaires were initially
developed, a matrix was constructed to ensure consistency across the
research instruments. The possible program areas were grouped into eight
topic areas: General Management, Operations, Human Resources, Financial,
International, Marketing, Regulation and Other Topics. The final iteration
in the development of the questionnaires ensured that where program
interest was examined across two or more industries, then consistent
terminology would be used for each of the questionnaires. This allowed
for the results from the various industries to be combined so that program
interest could be determined across all industries, where appropriate.
Five questionnaires were utilized.
As can be noted from the questionnaires, respondents indicated their
view of the value of each program option on a five-point scale. The
first, or left hand point on the scale allowed respondents to indicate
that they were uncertain about the value of a particular program. Moving
to the right on the scale, respondents were able to indicate successively
higher levels of perceived need. Without adjustment, responses in the
"Uncertain" category would tend to understate the mean value
for those who evaluated the benefit of a particular program option.
For purposes of this analysis, uncertain responses were recoded as missing
values so that the uncertain response would not be included in the calculation
of mean scores for each of the program options. Thus, responses that
were included in the analysis had values ranging from 2 to 5 representing
"Little Need" to "Great Need" respectively.
A second major area of interest was whether differences existed between
small businesses that were Clients of the Small Business Development
Centers versus those who were not. Crosstabulation analysis, using the
chi-square statistic to determine if significant differences exist,
was utilized. In this analysis, two variables are examined simultaneously
to determine if they are independent or whether a possible relationship
or association between the two is suggested. The relationship is determined
when the two variables form a matrix. That is, if variable A has two
possible responses and variable B has three possible responses, a 2
x 3 matrix is formed that results in six cells that represent all of
the possible combinations of responses between the two variables. The
basis for the analysis is to determine the expected value for each of
the cells in the matrix. The expected value represents the proportionate
number of respondents that would be expected to fall in that cell if
the two variables being studied were perfectly independent of one another.
Also recorded in each cell is the actual number of respondents who answered
in that particular combination of responses between the two variables.
The analysis, chi-square statistic, and corresponding p-value are the
result of a comparison of the expected value and actual value for each
of the cells in the matrix. Significance is measured in terms of the
p-value. A dependent relationship between the two variables is most
often suggested when the corresponding p-value is less than the .05
value. An even stronger dependent relationship between the two variables
is suggested when the p-value is less than the .01 value.
In the Client/Non-Client analysis, if no differences were found to
exist between the two groups, then future promotional materials could
be distributed without regard to Client status. However, if a substantial
number of differences were found to exist, then the differences might
be used as a basis to segment the large Non-Client market.
Each of the 2,687 small businesses that were shown as current SBDC
Clients were sent a questionnaire that corresponded to their business
type. (Surveys were sent to 509 Manufacturers, 90 Wholesalers, 660 Retailers,
1,296 Service Firms and 132 Construction Companies.) The overall response
rate for this group was 13.2 percent.
needs assessment | process/intro
| methodology
