Contemporary Business Studies - Academy of Knowledge Process ...

International Journal of Contemporary Business StudiesVol: 4, No: 2. February, 2013 ISSN 2156-7506Available online at http://www.akpinsight.webs.com4.2 Data CollectionIn this research, the primary data are collected using questionnaire survey. A questionnaire, also known asself-administered survey is handed out to certain targets or segments of people to gather data andinformation desired. For the purpose of this study, 450 copies of questionnaire were distributed. Theselected area was in Penang and the institutions selected were UniversitiSains Malaysia, INTIInternational College Penang, SEGi College Penang and Olympia College Penang.5.0 DATA ANALYSISA total of 450 sets of questionnaires were distributed to the potential respondents and a total of 387questionnaires were collected. Out of this, 23 sets of the questionnaires were considered unusable becauseover 25 percent of the questions in Part 1 – Section A of the questionnaire were not answered (Sekaran,2003). It was assumed that the respondents were either unwilling to cooperate or not serious with thesurvey. Therefore, only 364 usable sets of collected questionnaires were used for the data analysis.Thereby, the response rate was 80.89 percent. Section A collects the respondents’ demographic datawhich consists of elements such as gender, age, ethnicity, and marital status. Section B consists of sevenindependent variables, which is of this study’s main purpose: to determine the individual dispositionalcharacteristics and career capitals that affect the respondents’ perceived employability. Each variablecomprises of three to ten questions that are required to be answered by the respondents. Section C consistsof six questions asking about the respondents’ perceived employability. SPSS was used to test therelationship between the independent variables and dependent variable using Pearson Correlation andMultiple Regression Analysis.5.1 Sampling Size and Technique5.1.1 Sampling SizeSampling size was defined as the number of elements to be included in the study (Malhotra, 2005).Creswell (2005) stated that “the larger the sample size, the less potential error”. Thus for this study, thebigger sampling size is more accurate in contrast to smaller sampling size and adequate size of the samplecan be used to estimate accurate actual population parameters and reduce sampling error. Candidates mustmeet three conditions or requirements before qualified as valid respondents. Proper selection ofrespondent is essential for the study to achieve its research objectives. Working fresh graduates, in ourstudy refers to graduates who:(i) Are fresh graduates from their respective institutions within 12 months;(ii) Currently employed and(iii) Have worked for not more than one year (12 months).In other words, graduates who were graduated for more than 12 months or have more than one year ofworking experience would not be deemed as working fresh graduate’s in our research context.5.1.2 Sampling TechniqueNon-probability sampling is used, instead of probability sampling because of unavailability of samplinglist which defines every element in a population. There are four types of non-probability samplingtechniques which are (i) convenience sampling, (ii) judgment sampling, (iii) snowball sampling and (iv)quota sampling. The types of non-probability sampling that were used in this study are judgmentsampling and snowball sampling.2013©Academy of Knowledge Process17