Cronbach's Smes: A Case Study

In this study, Cronbach’s alpha was used to measure the reliability of the variables in measuring the competencies, which are factors. The Cronbach’s alpha value show in above table is greater than 0.70 which indicating that the factors employed in this study is highly reliable since all the value are above 0.80 (Pallant, 2001).

4.2 Descriptions of the Population

The survey questionnaires were conducted with 100 SMEs in the clothing and textile industry in mainland China. The participated firms in this study include of manufacturing firms, retail stores, distributors and wholesalers that registered under the Small and Medium Enterprise in China National Textile and Apparel Council (CNTAC). Following sections provided the descriptive statistic of study sample.

Since this study will focus on SMEs and the majority of the survey respondents were either the owners, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), general manager or director of the firm.

In general, the majority of the SMEs in the clothing and textile industry are tended to follow the overall market fashion trends or multinational firms and did not spend too much of resources on R&D. This is in line with the results indicated in Table 4.16 where majority of the respondents firm invested insignificant amount in R&D. 75.82% of the respondents firm spend between 1 to 50000 yuan on R&D while only 7.69% firms spent above 1 million yuan per year in R&D. Study also shown that 9 out 100 SMEs did not invest on R&D at all.

As shown in Table 4.17, most SMEs did not spend significant amount of resources on R&D, so the percentage of R&D cost in company yearly expenses is relatively small (5% and below). Only five firms spent above 11% on their total expenses on R&D cost. These result also in line with the number of products produced by the