Youth attitudes to enterprise : an evaluation of the Achievement Australia \venture\" program from one perspective"

Young Achievement Australia (YAA) provides several forms of enterprise styled education programs. One program is the Venture program for adolescents. It could be argued that participants in the Venture program act as entrepreneurs, creating and operating a new small business, using goods and services they have designed or adapted. The new business operates in the real business world. The relationship between the Venture program and participants' attitudes to enterprise form the core of this research. Thus an evaluation of this program was undertaken in 1993. The evaluation was divided into four components: a demographic survey, an attitude test, participant observations and a telephone survey. Data were obtained from three perspectives, while the demographic survey provided sample details. All (118) Tasmanian Venture participants were offered the demographic and attitude surveys, the latter on a pre-post basis. All (26) participants of Group 1 were observed by the researcher for six months. Ten participants from Group 1 were surveyed by telephone on completion of the program. The attitude test was based on the Entrepreneurial Attitude Orientation (EAO) instrument, which was used by Robinson et al. (1991) to distinguish entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs on the basis of attitudinal differences. The four attitude subscales which were studied related to affective, cognitive and conative aspects concerned with . achievement in business, self esteem in business, personal control in business and innovation in business. Seven of the twelve subscale components of the modified EA0 instrument were found to have acceptable internal consistency reliability. Of these seven subscale components, five showed significant differences between the pre-and post-test scores. One subscale component, self-esteem conation, showed a significant positive change in attitudes for the grouped Venture participants. The remaining four subscale components recorded negative attitude changes. The telephone survey provided insight into the attitude systems of individual Venture participants. Both negative and positive entrepreneurial behavioural intentions were evident in the attitude systems. Whole group attitude changes were thus detected in five of the twelve subscale components of the attitude test and individual attitude changes were detected by the telephone survey. From participant observation, limited evidence of true entrepreneurial behaviour was found. As far as attitudes are concerned, it was found that entrepreneurial qualities such as innovation may be actually stifled by the program. The program, however, is related to positive changes in participants self-esteem in relation to entrepreneurial behaviour. Venture also impacts on career options of participants.