Construction of an instrument to measure social valuation in an emerging market context

This study aims to construct a parsimonious instrument to measure social valuation in a collective setting using Uganda as an example.

A triangulation technique was used in this study. Conversations with students, parents, teaching and non‐teaching staff at Uganda Christian University (UCU) main campus were carried out, as well as a rigorous review of the literature to gather an original set of items on social valuation. Content and face validity were carried out in order to get rid of redundant and ambiguous items. The remaining items were incorporated in a questionnaire which was pretested before being distributed to a convenience sample of 650 third‐year business students on the four campuses of UCU, each located in one of the four regions of Uganda.

Principal axis factoring by promax rotation extracted six oblique factors accounting for 56 percent of the variance, namely, teaching of entrepreneurship in schools, family, knowledge, institutions, perception of education, and culture. Confirmatory factor analysis found the measurement model to have acceptable fit statistics.

The study used a convenience sample of students from four campuses of one institution in the country.

Government and other stakeholders in the entrepreneurial sector should use the instrument developed in this study as a guide in a bid to enhance entrepreneurship.

Existing measures of social valuation were designed in the West and may not be wholly applicable in a developing country setting. The instrument designed in this study in a collective setting should be a great contribution to entrepreneurial research and development in developing economies.