ABSTRACT
Much of the data gathered from the first administered questionnaire (AQ 1985) was in the form of rankings. Typically, the owner-manager of an SBE was asked what action s/he would take in a contingent circumstance. In Reid (1990a) I have examined a range of such circumstances, but here I shall confine myself to the financial inception of the SBE. An example of rankings data of relevance to this chapter would be that arising from questions put to owner-managers about sources of advice used at the point of financial inception. These would include family or friends, the bank manager, and the local Enterprise Trust. If the owner-manager were asked to say whom s/he would consult first (for example, his or her family) and whom next (perhaps his or her accountant) and so on, s/he would be providing a type of ranking, which in this case would be a temporal ordering. Alternatively, s/he might be asked to rank the sources of advice used at financial inception according to their importance to him/her. Thus, the accountant might be ranked as most important, family and friends next most important, and so on.1 Here, the owner-manager is again providing a type of ranking, this time based on utility, or intensity of preference. From a statistical viewpoint, one makes no distinction between rankings generated by either of these methods (or indeed
by any others), and a range of statistical procedures is available for analysing such rankings. A brief account of some of the more formal aspects of these techniques, as they can be applied to economic data, is given in the appendix to this chapter (page 78).
