Social enterprises, businesses set up to tackle problems such as poverty or pollution, are seen in Indonesia as a way to boost economic development and empower communities. Encouraging more of them often starts at university, where students are weighing up their careers. Yet researchers studying Indonesian students’ plans have lacked a properly tested questionnaire in their own language.
Researchers at Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya and Universitas Muhammadiyah Purworejo adapted and tested an Indonesian version of an eight-item scale first developed for university students in Hong Kong. The findings appear in The Open Psychology Journal. The scale was chosen partly because it came from an Asian setting with a similar education system.
The questionnaire was sent to 560 undergraduates at three private universities, and 472 completed it. Of these, 432 met the study’s criteria, which required students to be at least in their third year, to have had some entrepreneurship education, and to pass an attention check. Most were aged 20–22, and 272 were women.
Social entrepreneurial intention is a person’s interest in, conviction about, and plans for starting a business with a social purpose. Cross-cultural adaptation means making a questionnaire work in another language and culture while keeping its original meaning. Validation is the process of checking that it measures what it is meant to measure.
The adaptation passed its main tests. A panel of five experts rated the items as relevant and clear, giving a content validity score of 0.92 against a usual minimum of 0.78. Statistical analysis showed that the eight items measured a single underlying concept, with reliability of 0.87.
Some results were weaker than for the original. The strength of individual items ranged 0.53–0.74, compared with 0.67–0.90 for the Hong Kong version, and one further check fell just short of the recommended level. The model’s fit with the data was rated excellent on some indices and acceptable on others.
Two translators produced Indonesian versions, which were merged and then translated back into English by two more translators living in English-speaking countries. Six students then talked through each item in interviews. Some found certain terms unfamiliar, and a few felt six answer options were too many to tell apart.
One item was changed because it did not fit local reality. A statement about promoting a social enterprise as a professional manager was simplified, since Indonesian social enterprises tend to have less complex structures. The researchers say the final version matched the original in meaning, idiom, experience, and concept.
The study has clear limits. Participants were a convenience sample from three private universities in one region, so they may not represent students at public universities or polytechnics, or in other regions. The scale has not yet been tested against related measures such as empathy or social values, and it captures intention rather than whether students go on to start enterprises.
Earlier Indonesian research on social entrepreneurship has often used English-language questionnaires without explaining whether or how they were adapted, which makes results hard to compare. A tested local version should make future studies more consistent, and the researchers invite others to contact them for a copy. They call for more diverse samples covering different regions, types of institution, and backgrounds.
Indonesian researchers now have a workable, if imperfect, tool for measuring how seriously students consider becoming social entrepreneurs.
