An Instrument Analysis ofResilience and Women Entrepreneur Success: The Context of Malaysian Micro and Small Enterprise

Abstract

Women entrepreneurs have played an important role in the business world for the past 30 years. The area of women entrepreneurship is in growing stage where there are increasing number of articles published in this area. However, the result indicated that the number of women involvements in small business are still at unsatisfactory level. In spite of the number of researches which has attempt to discover if there are any clear characteristics to distinguish between success and unsuccessful, but the finding found that there is no single characteristics. Thus, there is a need to conduct the study regarding the internal factors of successful women entrepreneurs. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to emphasis the role of resilience toward women entrepreneur success in the context of Micro and Small Entreprise (MSE). Previous literature proved that the entrepreneur resilience may assist in explaining entrepreneurial success. However, due to lack of resilience and entrepreneur success measurement generally recognized by the researcher, hence, this study analyzethe validity and reliabilityof the instrument used to measure those two variables. The psychometric properties of the Connor and Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) was used as an instrument to measure resilience, while the instrument of women
entrepreneur success constructed by adapting from previous literature. In so doing, 23- item of resilience and six items of women entrepreneur success was implemented on 200 women’s MSE in Malaysia by using self-administered survey method. Content validity and Cronbach’s alpha were used to validate and test reliability for the instrument. The instrument used is found to have high reliability and good construct validity. Thus, the instrument has been shown to be reliable and valid tool to be used for the study as well as in Malaysian context.