Success and failure incidents from self-employed women

The purpose of this study was to investigate how self-employed women interpret the entrepreneurial experience. Business-related incidents of success and failure from self-employed women were examined from two perspectives: (1) Bakan's (1966) constructs of agency and communion, and (2) attribution theory. A pool of potential respondents (self-employed women living in a large midwestern metropolitan area) was screened by telephone to ensure that they met the following criteria: (1) the woman must have been in business for herself continuously for at least two years in the same business; (2) she must have started the business herself, initiated the business in partnership, or bought the business; (3) if the business was a partnership or corporation, over half the ownership must have been held by women; and (4) she must have been working full-time in one or more self-employment situations. If a respondent did not meet the criteria, a replacement was chosen randomly from the pool. Seventy-six women were excluded from the sample in this way. The final sample consisted of 61 women. Data were collected in 1979 by personal interviews. Each woman was asked to describe and answer questions about three success incidents and three failure incidents related to her business. Questions about the meaning respondents attached to each incident were based on Bakan's constructs of agency and communion. For each incident, respondents were also asked to rate each of 11 causes to which the incident might be attributed. A Career Information Interview Schedule was also used to collect background data on the business, work history, influential persons, parents' occupations, marital status, and family structure of the respondents. The Murray Center holds all computer-accessible data for this study, as well as interviewer notes from the forced choice and open-ended responses in the interview.