Technology and Higher Education: What Works and what is the Future?

ii. ascertain the effect of self-confidence on the Business success of small and medium scale enterprises in selected states in North Central, Nigeria.

iii. determine the effect of firm size on the Business success of small and medium scale enterprises in selected states in North Central, Nigeria.

iv. examine the effect of profitability on the Business success of small and medium scale enterprises in selected states in North Central, Nigeria.

II Methodology

A survey research design was utilized for this study This research design begins with a procedures in which investigators administer a survey to a sample or to the entire population of people to describe the attitudes, opinions, behaviours, or characteristics of the population. For this study, the population of the study comprises Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in three (3) purposively sampled states of Benue, Nassarawa and Kogi all located in the North Central region of Nigeria Multistage sampling technique was used for the study. At the first stage, purposive sampling technique was used to purposively pick three (3) out of the seven (7) states that make up the North Central States and fifty (50) Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in each of the selected States. At the second stage, simple random sampling technique was used to select fifty (50) respondents and to give equal chances of being included in the study to every respondents in the study. Therefore, the population of the study comprise of one hundred and fifty (150) small and medium scale enterprises in the three (3) selected states in North Central, Nigeria. Validity

of Instruments

The instrument for our data was subjected to factor analysis to determine its validity. A pilot test was conducted and the input variable factors used for this study were subjected to exploratory factor analysis to investigate whether the constructs as described in the literature fits the factors derived from the factor analysis.

Source: SPSS Result Output, 2020

Table 1 indicates that the KMO (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin) measure for the study’s variable items is 0.870 with Barnett's Test of Sphericity (BTS) value to be 10 at a level of significance p=0.028. Our KMO result in this analysis surpasses the threshold value of 0.50 as recommended in literature. This indicate that the sample for this study is adequate

Table 2: Total Variance Explained

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.

Source: SPSS Result Output, 2020

As shown by the result of the Total Variance Explained table, the variance is divided among the five (5) possible factors. Three (2) of the factors have Eigenvalues (a measure of explained variance) greater than 1.0, which is a common criterion for a factor to be useful. When the Eigenvalue is less than 1.0 the factor explains less information than a single item would have explained. Table 2 shows that the Eigenvalues are 1.427, 1.177 and 1.086 are all greater than 1. Component one produced a variance of 27.949, component 2 a variance of 23.873 while component three produced the variance a variance of 21.985. The cumulative of the rotated sum of squared loadings section indicates that three components i.e

Technology and Higher Education: What Works and what is the Future?

component 1, 2 and 3 accounted for 73.807 percent of the variance of the whole variables of the study. This shows that the variables have strong construct validity.

Source: Author Computation, 2020

As shown in the figure 1 above, the scree plot and the Eigenvalues support the conclusion that the five (5) variables used in the study can be reduced to three (3) components. The scree plot is downward sloping and show that after the first three components, differences between the Eigenvalues decline sharply (the curve flattens), and they are less than 1.0. This again supports a three components solution.

Cronbach's Alpha Cronbach's Alpha Based on Standardized Items

Source: SPSS Result Output, 2020 of Items

Table 3 shows the reliability statistics which indicates that the Cronbach Alpha value is 0.861. Reliability Cronbach Alpha statistics of 0.70 is considered adequate and reliable for study. Hence, the variable of this study falls above the limit of a reliable instrument for this study.

Source: SPSS Result Output, 2020

As shown in Table 4, an item-total correlation test is performed to check if any item in the set of tests is inconsistent with the averaged behaviour of the others, and thus can be discarded. A reliability analysis was carried out on the variables of the study values scale comprising five (5) items. Cronbach’s Alpha showed the questionnaire to reach acceptable reliability, α = 0.861. All items appeared to be worthy of retention, resulting in a decrease in the alpha if

Technology and Higher Education: What Works and what is the Future?

deleted. There is no exception to this in all the variables of the study as none of the items if deleted will improve the overall Cronbach alpha statistics. As such, none of the variables was removed. A correlation value less than 0.2 or 0.3 indicates that the corresponding item does not correlate very well with the scale overall and, thus, it may be dropped.

Model Specification

Multiple regression analysis was employed to determine the effect or outcome of the relationship between dependent and the independent variables.

The implicit model form of the model is as shown below:

SSM = f (CRT, SFC, FMS, PRF)- - - - - - - - (1)

Where,

SSM = Success of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises

CRT= Creativity

SFC = Self-confidence

FMS = Firm size

PRF = Profitability

The explicit forms of the formula above are depicted below:

SSM = b0 + b1CRT + b2SFC + b3FMS + b4PRF + Ut- - - - (2)

Where: b0 = intercept value of the dependent variable b1 - b4 regression coefficients

Ut = random error term

A priori expectations b1> 0, b2 > 0, b3> 0. b4 > 0

Methods of Data Analysis

In this study, the multiple regression analysis was used to determine the effect of independent (entrepreneur and firm characteristics) variables on the predictor variable (success of small and medium scale enterprises) To test the study hypotheses, the probability value of the estimate were used with the decision rule that If the probability values of the estimate is less than the critical value. we reject the null hypothesis, that is, we accept that the estimate bi is statistically significant at the 5 percent level of significance if not vice versa.

III Results and Discussion

Technology and Higher Education: What Works and what is the Future?

Source: SPSS Result Output, 2020 a. Predictors: (Constant), PRF, FMS, SFC, CRT b. Dependent Variable: SSM Source: SPSS Result Output, 2020 a. Dependent Variable: SSM b. Predictors: (Constant), PRF, FMS, SFC, CRT Source: SPSS Result Output, 2020

The figure above shows a histogram of the residuals with a normal curve superimposed. The residuals look close to normal, implying a normal distribution of data. Here is a plot of the residuals versus predicted dependent variable of Business Success of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SSM).The pattern shown above indicates no problems with the assumption that the residuals are normally distributed at each level of the dependent variable and constant in variance across levels of Y.

Table 5 shows that the result of the coefficient of determination R2 for the study is 0.723 or 72.3 percent. This indicates that 72.3 percent of the variations in the model can be explained by the explanatory variables of the model while 27.7 percent of the variation can be attributed to unexplained variation captured by the stochastic term.

The F-ratio in the Analysis o Variance (ANOVA) table above tests whether the overall regression model is a good fit for the data. The table shows that the independent variables statistically significantly predicts the dependent variable F (4, 15) = 1.123, p <0.038b (i.e., the regression model is a good fit of the data) a. Dependent Variable: SSM

Source: SPSS Result Output, 2020

As shown in Table 7, Creativity (CRT) has a positive effect on the Business success of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in North Central, Nigeria (SSM) and the effect is statistically significant (p <0.05) and in line with a priori expectation This means that a unit increases in Creativity (CRT) will cause a corresponding increase in the Business Success of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in selected States in North Central, Nigeria (SM) by a margin of 47.5 percent. Using the probability value of the estimate, we reject the null hypothesis, that is, we accept that the estimate b1