Questionnaires
The questionnaire used in the main survey included four different forms:
Form I. The enterprise list, used for listing all the enterprises within the PSU9 to identify the enterprise, entrepreneur, and associated household. All members of the enterprise universe were included in the first listing (identifying nature of enterprise), but those in excluded activities were not given the Form II used in the main survey.
Exclusion rules concern agricultural and non-market activities, illegal activities, production for own personal use, mobile vendors, domestic services, professional services (except ICT) and enterprises
with 50 and more persons engaged.
Sampling rule designed to under-sample smaller sizes and men entrepreneurs Entrepreneur women:
(size 1=>1/5; size 2-9 =>1/1; size 10-49=>1/1)
Entrepreneur men: (size 1=>1/10; size 2-9 =>1/2; size 10-49=>1/1)
The size 1 enterprises were deliberately under-sampled to avoid dominating the sample by enterprises size 1, and therefore have statistically significant number of enterprises in the sample for the larger size. The over sampling of enterprises with women entrepreneurs was necessary in order to ensure that the sample included sufficient number of women entrepreneurs to obtain statistically significant results.
Form II. Household roster-enterprise identification. This type of questionnaire included identification variables for the members of the household and possible MSEs at home.
Form III. Enterprise-entrepreneur questionnaire focused on characteristics of the entrepreneur and enterprise. Form III contained 322 questions related to the characteristics of the entrepreneur and the enterprise, growth performance, access to credit, financial and business services, relations with business associations, status of registration, level of technology, value of assets, main customers, exports, linkages with other enterprises, constraints to business activity, the problems specific to women entrepreneurs and characteristics of the work force.
Form IV. Household questionnaire dealt with the characteristics of the members of the entrepreneur’s household and the analysis of the inter-relations between the household and the enterprise.
The advantage of this mode of approach, which was having four different forms of questionnaires, is that it allowed investigation of the economic units for which we do not have a complete list. Area sampling, followed by door to door surveying ensured that establishments and household components are combined into one operation, with canvassing of all production units, whether in establishments, household premises, fixed units, in the street or market places. This method avoided the complications
of going through the household, getting addresses for economic units/establishments but not finding them.
Although the questions in these forms mostly specified a number of possible answers, some questions were nonetheless deliberately left “open” to encourage free expression of attitudes and opinions by the respondents when none of the existing answers matched the respondent’s answer, or when “other” categories were marked and the answer given by the respondent was written precisely in the space provided.
The questionnaire was originally written in English and then translated into Turkish. The final changes were based on the inputs from the pre-test and comments made by experts and experienced bodies at the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) and the Istanbul Chamber of Industry. Wording of the instrument questions and alternative response categories for instrument items were
refined to ensure accuracy and comparability.
=============================================================================================
A comprehensive description of the questionnaire design for the main survey is provided in Appendix 3 in the full report available among external resources.
=============================================================================================