6.ENTREPRENEURSHIP

International Journal of Business Management & Research (IJBMR) ISSN 2249-6920 Vol. 2 Issue 4 Dec 2012 53-58 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.,

ENTREPRENEURSHIP AMONG STUDENTS – A TWO GROUP DISCRIMINANT MODEL H. SAMUEL THAVARAJ Assistant Professor, Department of Rural Industries and Management Gandhigram Rural Institute – Deemed University, Gandhigram – 624 302, Dindigul District, Tamilnadu, India

ABSTRACT Entrepreneurs play a vital role in the economic development of a country. Economic development of a Country depends primarily on the entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur is often considered as a person who sets up his own business or industry. He looks for opportunities and seizes opportunities mainly for economic gains. Entrepreneurs are action-oriented, highly motivated individuals who take risks to achieve goals. Thus the concept of ‘entrepreneur ‘ has been received attention of socio-economic variables, industrialists and academicians across the globe.

In India, more than 50 percent of workforce is self-employed. Entrepreneurship paves better employment to the youth of our country, who constitute the major portion of the unemployment figures. The problem of unemployment cannot be solved unless the educated youth are trained and involved in entrepreneurship oriented activities rather than developing them as a job seeker. India is a labour intensive country, which the entrepreneur can use the maximum that would solve the unemployment problem and in turn lead to economic development of the country. In spite of mushroom growth of various financial institutions and government schemes, the youth is not aspiring to use these opportunities to become entrepreneur but instead the search employment. Moreover, today the scenario is slowly changing with the multiplicity of disciplines, where parents are no longer decision-makers when it comes to their children’s choice of career for both boys and girls, because they take their own decisions. Keeping this in mind the researchers has taken the steps to identify the socio-economic variables that discriminate the students to prefer to become an entrepreneur or not.

KEYWORDS: Entrepreneurs, Socio-Economic Variables, Socio-Economic Variables, Self-Employed INTRODUCTION Today’s business is encountering changes very fast. What is new today becomes obsolete tomorrow. Traditionally business was managed as family concern, but then started looking for professionalism when monopoly was bid a good bye.

But, even with professionalism, industrial groups do not want to let go their style of functioning as it had given them a sense of power in the past. To name a few, the Tatas, Birlas, TVS group is among those trying to hold their work culture identity even with professionals at their helm.

Considering the vastness and population of our country, where 70 percent of the population lives in rural India.

With liberalisation and global competition being the governing societal paradigm and with the acknowledgement that wealth creation is of more importance, the concept of rural Entrepreneurship is receiving closer attention than from urban business management scholars and social scientists.

OBJECTIVES 1.

To identify the Students’ attitude towards entrepreneurship.

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H. Samuel Thavaraj

2.

To reveal the discriminating socio-economic variables that discriminate the Students attitude towards entrepreneurship.

METHODOLOGY The study is confined with the postgraduate students who are selected from the colleges, which have a minimum of five or more postgraduate courses in Madurai. Based on the above criteria 10 colleges a maximum of 5 Post-Graduate courses were randomly selected.

The discriminate function model has been applied to identify the discriminatory variables towards entrepreneurship. The model is expressed explicitly as: ΖI

= bo+b1X + ………… + bn X

Where ΖI = the ith individual’s discriminant score Ζcril = the critical value for the discriminant score Ζni = the ith individual’s value of the nth independent variable. bn = the discriminant coefficient for the nth independent variable.

For the classification procedure, let each individual’s discriminant score Ζi be a function of the independent variables.

That is ΖI = bo+b1Xli + ……. +bnXni. The classification procedure is as follows: If Ζ ≥ Ζcrit classify individual i as belonging to group I (entrepreneurial attituded respondents) and if ΖixΖcrit classify individual i as belonging to group-II (non-entrepreneurial attituded respondents). The classification boundary will then be the locus of points where bo + b1 Xli + b2 X2i + ….. bn Xni = Ζcri

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS Attitude plays a vital role in affecting the behaviour of a person. Based on the attitude of a person, he decides the job career. So, at the student level, if the students’ attitude towards various professions is identified, the students can be directed accordingly or the skills can be tuned to match his job career. In this connection, an attempt is made by the researchers to reveal the attitude of the students towards entrepreneurship, which is shown in the below mentioned table 1.

Table 1: Attitude of the Students towards Entrepreneurship Particulars

Male

Female

YES (Positive)

67

52

NO (Negative)

82

49

Total

149

101

Total 119 (47.6) 131 (52.4) 250 (100)

From the above table it can be inferred that only about 48 percent of the Post Graduate students prefer to become an entrepreneur. Among the male students, 44.97 per cent are willing to become an entrepreneur, whereas among the

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Entrepreneurship Among Students – A two Group Discriminant Model

female students, it constitutes 51.49 per cent to the total. It reveals that the entrepreneurship among the female students is relatively higher than among the male students.

DISCRIMINANT FUNCTION ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP In order to find out the most important discriminatory (socio-economic) variables regarding the entrepreneurship, the respondents are classified into Group-I and Group II who are interested and not interested in entrepreneurship respectively. The variables taken for the analysis are sex, age and family income. The multi discriminant function has been applied. The model is expressed explicitly as: Ζi = bo+b1X1 +b2X2+b3X3.

Whereas X1

- Sex of the respondents

X2

- Age of the respondents and

X3

- Family income

The estimated discriminant function towards entrepreneurship using the stepwise discriminant analytical procedure is shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Standardised Canonical Discriminant Function Coefficients S.No

Variable

1 2 3

Sex Age Family Income

Discriminant Coefficients 0.5924 0.6428 0.7271

The discriminant coefficients of the variables namely sex, age and family income are 0.5924, 0.6428 and 0.7271 respectively. The above coefficients are also significant. The most influencing variable that discriminate the Group I and Group II are family income, age and sex respectively. The most influencing variable for discrimination namely family income has a discriminant coefficient of 0.7271, followed by age with the discriminant coefficient of 0.6428. The discriminant coefficient of sex is only 0.5924. The analysis infers that the most influencing discriminatory variable is family income. It means that the Family Income among the students discriminate the students as more interested in starting enterprises and not interested in it.

Relative contribution of the three variables to the total discriminant coefficient was estimated and presented in Table 3.

Table 3: Percentage Contribution of Individual Variables to the Total Discrimant Scores S.No

Variable

Discriminant Co-efficient

Mean Difference

Product

Percent Contribution

Sex 0.4976 0.5924 0.84 0.02 Age 1.3447 0.6428 2.092 0.05 Family 2913.76 0.7271 4007.38 99.93 income 2915.6 It is noted from the table-3 that all the three variables in the discriminant function made its contribution to the 1 2 3

respondents’ attitude towards entrepreneurship. The contribution made by the variables namely sex and age are varying as

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H. Samuel Thavaraj

minimum of 0.02 and 0.05 percent respectively. The variable namely family income alone contributes 99.93 percent in the total discriminant score. It shows the importance of the family income on the discriminant score.

The group means and differences in mean between the respondents in Group – I and Group – II are set out in Table 4.

Table 4: Group Means and Mean Difference for Discriminant Variable S.No

Group I

Group II

Mean Difference

1

Sex

1.79

0.95

0.84

2

Age

23.82

21.728

2.092

3

Family Income

12417.90

8410.52

4007.38

The group means of sex, age and family income among the respondents are 0.84, 2.092 and 4007.38 respectively.

It shows that the respondents in Group-I have relatively more scores in all the three variables among the respondents in Group–II. The estimated function was subjected to the statistical test of significance. In order to test the significance level, the economical correlation, Wilk’s Lambda and chi-square values are calculated.

The result is presented in

Table 5.

Table 5: Statistical Test of Significance for the Discriminant Function Canonical Correlation

0.5724

Wilks Lambda

0.3141

Chi-Square

59.331

DF

5

The moderate canonical correlation coefficient of 0.5724 and low Wilk’s Lambda of 0.3141 indicate that the discriminant function developed in this study provides a moderate significant amount of information required in measuring the entrepreneurship of the respondents.

The calculated chi-square value is also significant at 5 percent level of

significance.

In order to know how well the developed discriminant function in the present study will perform in classifying the respondents, the performance test is applied through the discriminant function. The resulted actual and predicted cases are presented in Table 6.

Table 6: Classification Performance of the Estimated Discriminant Function Actual Group

No. of Cases

Predicted Group

Membership

Group I

119

93

26

Group II

131

24

107

Percentage classified

of

cases

correctly

80.00

The developed discriminant function misclassified in Group-I to an extent of 21.8 percent while it is 18.32 percent in Group – II. In total, the classification performance of the function, which is about 80 percent, is at an acceptable level.

Entrepreneurship Among Students – A two Group Discriminant Model

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CONCLUSIONS The discriminatory socio-economic variables regarding the entrepreneurship among the students are Sex, Age and Family Income. Among the three significant discriminant variables, the first major variable is Family Income. From the study we can conclude that the above said variables is discriminating the two groups namely the students who prefer to become an entrepreneur and the students who does not prefer to become an entrepreneur.

Family Income plays a major role in the students’ preference towards entrepreneurship. It indicates the need for increase in family income among the students. It refers to the promotion of entrepreneurship among the students require a social and economic development. It is highly essential to promote the standard of living among the people to promote entrepreneurship since the entrepreneurship and family income are having a circular reasoning. The remedy for that constraint is promoting entrepreneurship among the family members of the students along with students through an “Entrepreneurship awareness Camp”. Our Prime Minister has also stated that “ We need to create a proper awareness among the youth about various employment and self-employment schemes of the government”, when he addressed at the Asian Summit on Youth Entrepreneurship & Employment on October 30, 2003, New Delhi. The government and the financial institutions should create more awareness about the various schemes to encourage potential entrepreneurs to utilize the opportunities in order to develop him and contribute to the development of the country.

REFERENCES 1.

Dr. Mala Sinha, “ Gender Socio-Economic Class and Employment Related Attitudes”, Journal of Management Research,1(3),May-August 2001, Pp 160-170.

2.

Dr. Aisha. M. sheriff, “Armed with the Facts”, Human Capital, 38(9), February 2000, Pp 28-29

3.

Dr. V. Balu, “ Entrepreneurial Ethics”, Indian Management, 38(10), October 1999, Pp 34-37.

4.

Jerome A Katz, “ Entry Strategies of the self-employed: Individual level characteristics and Organisational outcomes”, Frontiers Entrepreneurship Research (1984), Pp 396-399.

5.

Madhuri Deshpande and J. V. Joshi, “Entrepreneurship Development among Management Students”, SEDME 29.4, December 2002, Pp 97-107.

6.

Dr. M. Senthil & R. Magesh, “The Genesis of E –Entrepreneurship”, HRD Times, November 2000, P: 8-9.

7.

S. Chandrasekar & R. Magesh, “Indian Rural Entrepreneurship”, HRD Times, December 2000, P: 9-11.