ATTITUDE TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP AMONG STUDENTS: TESTING A MEASUREMENT SCALE

. The overwhelming goal of the research is to evaluate the attitudes and behaviours of youth towards sustainability issues and sustainable entrepreneurship. The current paper reflects the results of the first research stage and aims at testing a measurement scale that consists of three groups of items: 1) statements about environmental attitudes and behaviours, 2) general intention to start a sustainable business, 3) intention to start a social business in the field of the circular economy. The reliability analysis to measure the internal consistency of the scale was performed in SPSS environment, using Cronbach alpha. A focus group discussion was organized among business students to evaluate the perceived quality of the questionnaire.


Introduction
Sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) is one of the instrument to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that "define global priorities for development up to the year 2030 and are pivotal for addressing the global economic, social and environmental challenges faced by the communities" (Apostolopoulos et al., 2018).The relationship between SE and SDGs is perfectly visualized by Crecente, Sarabia, and del Val (2021) in their paper "Sustainable entrepreneurship in the 2030 horizon".Schaltegger and Wagner (2011) see companies as core drivers towards sustainability, and their innovations play a key role for society to become more sustainable.Sunny and Shu (2019) stressed the tight relationship between economic growth, entrepreneurship, and innovations.Gu and Wang (2022) emphasize the importance of innovations as an engine of economic growth and highlight the new role of sustainable entrepreneurship by exchanging The goal of the current paper is to test the measurement scale of the authors' developed research instrument.
For this specific purpose, a pilot study among 36 Latvian students was conducted.Besides, before dissemination of the questionnaire, it was discussed by the focus group of Master students representing different study programmes from the study field of Economics and Entrepreneurship of the EKA University of Applied Sciences (Latvia).
Pilot survey results also allowed getting a preliminary understanding about students' attitudes towards sustainable business.Survey data was processed in an Excel and SPSS environment.The quality of the measurement scale was evaluated by means of reliability analysis, using the test for internal consistency with the calculation of Cronbach alpha.

The concept of sustainable entrepreneurship
SE can be defined in a different manner, highlighting the different aspects of sustainability.It "describes the nexus between sustainable development and entrepreneurship" (Farny & Binder, 2021).
The related, but not synonymous concepts, are "social entrepreneurship", "environmental entrepreneurship", "ecopreneurship", "circular entrepreneurship", and "green entrepreneurship".SE can be considered as an "umbrella concept".The authors of the current paper in their understanding of it follow the statement of Baporikar (2020) about sustainable entrepreneurs, i.e. "…sustainable entrepreneurs share the economic desires of conventional entrepreneurs; but they have additional desires to preserve the environment: desires attributed to ecological values." Table 1 summarizes several definitions provided by the researchers in 2011-2019.
The authors of the given paper understand sustainable entrepreneurship as an activity of entrepreneurs to "start a business to serve both self-interests and collective interests by addressing unmet social and environmental needs".
However, for the purposes of the research, the authors link sustainable entrepreneurship mostly with circular entrepreneurship, or social business in the field of circular economy.The concept of circular entrepreneurship is also frequently discussed in the literature (Cullen & De Angelis, 2021;Kuzma et al., 2021).Circular entrepreneurship model shows the entrepreneurial processes of exploration and exploitation of opportunities in the circular economy domain (Zucchella, 2019).In turn, circular economy is defined as "...a new economic model that represents sustainable progress towards efficient green growth, moving from a consumption and disposal-based linear model to extending the life and use of products and materials and minimising wastage" (European Investment Bank, 2019).

Attitudes towards the circular economy and sustainable entrepreneurship
The number of studies devoted to the investigation of attitudes towards environment, circular economy, sustainable entrepreneurship and related topics is quite big (Kalsoom, 2019;van Langen et al., 2021;Dunne & Bijwaard, 2021;Balakrishnan et al., 2020).
However, the main interest of the authors of the given paper was to find the papers with the described research instruments in order to use some questions for own questionnaire.The basic sources that have been used are summarized in Table 2.The results of the previous studies conducted in different countries that could be useful for the current research are, as follows: -A study conducted by Soomro, Almah-di, and Shah (2020, Pakistan, 412 MBA students) indicated the positive relationship between eco-friendliness and attitudes towards sustainable entrepreneurship; -A study by Koe, Alias, and Othman (2019, 185 students, Malaysia) revealed that "customers who understand sustainability and are prone to buying green products could be a great attraction for people to embark on sustainable entrepreneurship"; -The hypothesis "A positive attitude towards sustainable entrepreneurship has a positive influence on the intention to start a sustainable enterprise" was supported within the study of Thelken and Jong (2020, 407 students, the Netherlands and Germany).Similar results were received within the research of Vuorio, Puumalainen, and Fellnhofer (2018, 393 European students).The authors will not test hypotheses about the relationship between scale items within the current study; these activities are planned for the future, based on a large sample size.

Methodology
To achieve the research goal, the authors of the paper developed a questionnaire that consists of three parts: -Respondent profile questions -part A; -Environmental attitudes -part B; -Attitudes to sustainable entrepreneurship -part C; -Willingness to start a sustainable business (to be a social entrepreneur in the field of circular economy) -part D. The structure of the questionnaire is presented in Table 3.The alternative responses to the question "Age" were formulated, based on the theory of generations and relevant periods of birth (McCrindle & Wolfinger, 2010).
Part B was included into the questionnaire due to the fact that entrepreneurial intentions of sustainable entrepreneurs are driven mostly by their ecological values (Baporikar, 2020) or biospheric values (Thelken & Jong, 2020).The statements of B scale and their labels are presented in Table 4. Government should take action to solve our environmental problems even if it means that some of the products we now use would have to be changed or banned

Government actions 2
Government should place higher taxes on products that cause pollution in their manufacture or disposal, so that companies will be encouraged to find better ways to produce them

Government actions 3
The statements of the C scale and their labels are presented in Table 5.Part D includes several types of circular business with a short explanation and examples of real companies engaged in such a business.The business types offered to respondents were: -Production from waste, used products; -Closed-loop product design and prototyping; -Production of eco-products, environment-friendly products; -Collection of products for recycling; -Collection of waste; -Co-working services; -Collection and re-selling; -Sharing services; -Providing product-as-a-service (PAAS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS).The information about the companies used to explain the certain business type also included a link to the official web pages to simplify the process of understanding.
Initially, the questionnaire was discussed within the focus group -14 Master students of the EKA University of Applied Sciences (EKA) representing study programmes "Business "International Culture Project Management" and "Circular Economy and Social Entrepreneurship".
First of all, the students were provided with the list of definitions of sustainable entrepreneurship (Table 1) to get a full understanding of the concept.Then, the items of the questionnaire were discussed to check the perceived clarity.
After the corrections, the questionnaire as a Google form was disseminated between the students of EKA and the BA School of Business and Finance (BA).Participants from BA were the students representing the study programmes "Finance", "Business process management", and "Information systems of financial management".36 responses were received and processed, using frequency analysis and reliability analysis to test internal consistency of measurement scales (questionnaire's parts B and C).

Results
Focus group discussion yielded the following changes in the questionnaire: -In the part B, the statement "I am ready to reduce the use of plastics" was replaced with the statement "I am ready to reduce the use of single-used plastics".-The statement "I am ready to change some, or all, of my personal financial investments for more ethical or sustainability related investments options" was removed from the part B, because students did not really understand what kind of investments was asked about.-The Part C scale was initially based on the statements from the research instrument developed by Soomro, Almah-di, and Shah (2020).The students evaluated the statements as "too primitive" and "not consistent with the level of other questions".In the final version of the questionnaire, C scale was based on Liñán and Chen (2009).At the first stage of data processing, frequency analysis was applied to evaluate students' attitude to environment and readiness to care about it, attitude towards sustainable entrepreneurship, as well as the most attractive business types in the field of circular economy.
To respond to questions B and C, respondents were offered to use a five-point scale (1 -absolutely disagree; 5 -absolutely agree).Table 6 and Table 7 summarize the responses.The authors analysed only the answers "4" (agree) and "5" (absolutely agree) in order to rank the statements in the scales.According to the pilot survey results, respondents are ready to "reduce the use of single-used plastics" (94%).They also consider that "people should change their buying habits and way of life to solve our environmental problems" (86%).72% of the respondents also think that "Government should take action to solve our environmental problems even if it means that some of the products we now use would have to be changed or banned." The lowest number of respondents is ready to reduce heating at home to save electricity (33%) and reduce air travel (25%).
Considering that all the respondents in this pilot study were from Latvia -the country with relatively low average temperature, the non-readiness to reduce heat can be explained.For sure, this could checked, based on larger sample with representatives of other, warmer countries.According to these preliminary results, students are mostly ready to start a sustainable business to get profit.Solving of social or environmental problems is not a priority.Only 28% of the respondents have a sustainable business idea.
Table 8 summarizes the responses of the respondents, evaluating different types of business in the field of circular economy.The offered response scale was from 1 (never, the lowest probability) to 5 (the highest probability).The most attractive businesses for pilot survey respondents are "sharing services" (58.3%) and "production of eco-products, environment-friendly products" (55.6%).The less attractive business (8.3%) is "collection of waste".
At the second stage of data processing, a reliability analysis was performed in SPSS to test the measurement scales for internal consistency.Results of B scale test are presented in Table 9. Cronbach's alpha for the whole B scale was 0.737 that indicated a relatively high level of internal consistency (Taber, 2018).Deleting of the item "change transport" will increase the overall consistency of the measurement scale significantly (to 0.784).However, the authors took a decision to leave this item in the list and make an additional test, based on a larger sample.
Results of C scale test are presented in Table 10.Cronbach's alpha for the whole C scale was 0.856 that indicated a high level of internal consistency.There was no need revealed to remove any item from the scale, based on the criterion "Cronbach's Alpha if item deleted".

Table 1
SE "...is an activity to build and run a business with attention to the environment and the sustainability of existing resources to be used both for the present and in the future"

Table 2 .
Main literature sources to develop the questionnaire (source: compilation by the authors)

Table 3 .
Structure of the questionnaire (source: authors' developed, based on sources summarized in Table2)

Table 4 .
B scale statements and their labels (source: authors' developed)

Table 5 .
B scale statements and their labels (source: authors' developed)

Table 6 .
Percentage of respondents who selected "agree" or "absolutely agree" to evaluate the statements of B scale (source: authors' calculations)

Table 7 .
Percentage of respondents who selected "agree" or "absolutely agree" to evaluate the statements of C scale (source: authors' calculations)

Table 9 .
Test of the B scale for internal consistency (source: authors' calculations)

Table 10 .
Test of the C scale for internal consistency (source: authors' calculations)