Measuring Capital Structure Determinants of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): An Assessment of Construct Reliability and Validity of a Proposed Questionnaire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents the assessment of reliability and validity of a proposed questionnaire of the capital structure determinants. The questionnaire is developed based on the existing measurement scales from the literature, interviews and focus groups discussions with the SMEs’ owners from the East-Coast region of Malaysia. The study analysed a total of 384 questionnaires. This study analyses data using SPSS 24.0. A purification process involves scale reliability and Exploratory Factor Analysis. A total of 11 constructs and 40 out of the initial 52 items represent the theoretical model. Items assigned to each dimension consistently exhibited high loadings on their constructs. In addition, results showed a relatively high internal consistency, with a Cronbach alpha greater than 0.7 for all constructs, except for three of the constructs (i.e. commercial goals, social welfare goals, and external environment). This study contributes to theory extension and testing, verification of the conceptualisation and operationalisation of constructs, and replication of the previous studies. The findings help in introducing a research framework to be as a standard measurement for SMEs’ capital structure determinants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".