Development and validation of the adolescent's entrepreneurial attributes inventory: A mixed-methods approach

Abstract

This study introduces the Adolescent Entrepreneurial Attributes (AEA) scale, designed to measure key entrepreneurial attributes among adolescents within an educational context. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the research involved four distinct studies: a Delphi study to refine the measurement items, a survey of youth entrepreneurship course graduates to gather perceptions of entrepreneurial attributes, a psychometric assessment to test the reliability and validity of the AEA scale, and a SEM validation study to correlate the AEA with established measures of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intention. The findings revealed that the AEA scale is a reliable and valid tool that captures a nested profile of adolescents' entrepreneurial attributes, including innovativeness, opportunity recognition, risk-taking propensity, proactiveness, vision-driven thinking, ethical thinking, and communication and collaboration. The scale's development contributes to the field by providing a nuanced understanding of adolescents' entrepreneurial attributes. The scale supports educational efforts to assess entrepreneurship education (EE) with aims to nurture adolescents' generic entrepreneurial attributes, differentiating from existing measurements of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intentions to evaluate entrepreneurship education programs.