CHAPTER III

RESEARCH METHODOGY

Design

A descriptive – relational design will be adopted in this study. It will describe the present condition of SME in construction industry in Iloilo (city and province) in terms of manager, owner or entrepreneur characteristics. It will also find some relationship between variables, e.g. the level of knowledge on strategic, marketing, business and financial plan of the manager, owner, or entrepreneur of SME in construction industries and their management and entrepreneurship practice.

Research Instruments

A questionnaire will be prepared to gather needed information. Whenever possible, the respondents will requested to send by e-mail their completed forms as they will provided with an electronic copy of the questionnaire. The questions that will be included are about qualifications of owner, manager and/or entrepreneur, characteristics of the SME in construction company, the “level of knowledge”, the “level of access to”, practices and skills in entrepreneurship and management. The respondents will be the owner/entrepreneur, non-engineers who are managers and the engineers.

Validity and Reliability

(questionnaire are submitted for evaluation and approval: (a) for owners and/or entrepreneurs, (b) non-engineering managers and (c) for engineers )

The Respondents

The construction companies will include those who have residential, commercial, or industrial project experience. The project could be whole installation - electrical, mechanical, structural, etc. or just a part of a project. Manager, owner/entrepreneur will be those small and medium size contractors are who are based in Iloilo (city and province) or those contractors who are based outside Iloilo but have current (or previous) projects Iloilo (city and province).

The respondents will include the head or manager of the company on the site or offices. If the head office is away from Iloilo, respondents will either be visited or someone will be requested to gather information.

Sampling Technique

It is incumbent on the researcher to clearly define the target population. There are no strict rules to follow, and the researcher must rely on logic and judgment. The population is defined in keeping with the objectives of the study. Snowball sampling is a special non-probability method used when the desired sample characteristic is rare. It may be extremely difficult or cost prohibitive to locate respondents in these situations. Snowball sampling relies on referrals from initial subjects to generate additional subjects.

Data Collection

Questionnaire will be distributed to the respondents, personally and/or through e-mail. In-depth and multiple interviews whenever possible with owners and managers and senior personnel within selected SME in construction firms will be done to collect, identify and validate data.

Data Processing and Analysis

The survey data will be processed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 11.+ statistical package. Frequency tables will be generated to describe the characteristics of respondents and contingency tables will be prepared, chi-square, and gamma tests will be done to test the research hypotheses.