Psychometric Measure of Economic Sustainability of Small and Medium Enterprises: An Empirical Validation

Abstract

Empirical validation of a good psychometric measure to assess Economic Sustainability (ES) felt utmost critical in the domain of sustainable development. In the quantitative deductive tradition, this paper attempted to make available the empirical evidence for the ES measure developed by Matinaro et al. (2019) in the SME context of a developing country: Sri Lanka. 361 SMEs of three main categories were surveyed twice within one year, with their owners and managers directly involved in the surveyed SMEs' strategic, managerial, and operational functions. Eight dimensions of the sustainable economic performance of SMEs were evaluated based on the 24-item measure with a seven-point response scale. The confirmatory factor analysis was equipped to evaluate the instrument’s measurement properties. The results empirically proved the soundness of some measures in terms of validity and reliability