- Determination of expected affect
Use a cross sectional survey (N=600), with students from different parts of Greece in order to pre-test our measurement instruments (i.e., personality inventories, affect scale, risk perception, creativity, entrepreneurial intention, feasibility and desirability).
- Determination of the anticipated emotions via self-assessment questionnaires
Use a business creation scenario to capture experienced emotions from students. Experienced emotions will be captured with two different methods: (a) an alphabetized affect scale asking respondents to rate on 7-point scales the extent to which each of the emotion adjectives described how they were feeling about business startup allowing for naturally occurring emotions (N=300) and (b) a priming technique to make participants feel a certain emotion that is unrelated to the specific issue involved (i.e., business startup) (N=300).
- Determination of anticipated emotions using other cross-sectional means
Cross-sectional reports that much of the research has used have several limitations: person schema biases, temporal distance from the event, personality-level defenses and others have been identified.
- Emotions, family, financial status and education: how do all these impact upon entrepreneurship?
Data analysis.
- Development of audiovisual means to promote entrepreneurship.
Production of short spots (persuasion appeals), with the appropriate emotions derived from research finding in previous workpackages.
- Experimental assessment of the audiovisual means aimed to promote entrepreneurship
Two groups experiment. The random assignment of subjects to treatment and control groups allows control over extraneous variation caused by individual differences in attitudes, values, abilities, and other characteristics. The experimental group will watch the spots produce in WP 5, while the control group will not. We will test for group differences in terms of entrepreneurial intention, attitudes towards entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial feasibility and desirability.
- Design and implementation of a course aimed to promote entrepreneurship to university students
We will use a pretest–post-test quasi-experimental design. Data will be collected before and after an entrepreneurship course organized in Technical University of Crete, using 100 engineering students (50 taking the programme and 50 in a control group). The course will incorporate to the maximum degree the results from phase 1 of the project (i.e., relevant emotions). We will assess students’ attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and entrepreneurial intentions at the time starting the course and at the end of the course. Furthermore, if possible, we will use longitudinal data analysis techniques as described in Zampetakis et al. (2008). Finally we will assess the extent to which students were inspired at the end of the course to pursue entrepreneurship as a career option.