Owners and Managers

The data for this issue of the National Small Business Poll were collected for the NFIB Research Foundation by the executive interviewing group of The Gallup Organization. The survey interviews occurred over an extended period beginning in December 2006 and ending in April 2008 from a sample of small employers. The relevant questions were repeated in six different surveys in the Poll series. Because the relevant questions applied to relatively few respondents in each survey, multiple surveys were required in order to collect enough cases to be able to say something about managers. Hence, the six regular surveys conducted during the period acted as a type of caravan or omnibus survey. Throughout, “small employer” was defined for purposes of the surveys as a business owner employing no less than one individual in addition to the owner(s) and no more than 249.

The sampling frame used for the survey was drawn at the Foundation’s direction from the files of the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, an imperfect file but the best currently available for public use. A random stratified sample design is typically employed to compensate for the highly skewed distribution of small-business owners by employee size of firm (Table A1). Almost 60 percent of employers in the United States employ just one to four people meaning that a random sample would yield comparatively few larger small employers to interview. Since size within the small-business population is often an important differentiating variable, it is important that an adequate number of interviews be conducted among those employing more than 10 people. The interview quotas established to achieve these added interviews from larger, small-business owners are arbitrary but adequate to allow independent examination of the 10-19 and 20-249 employee size classes as well as the 1-9 employee size group.

Table A1
Sample Composition under Varying Scenarios

*Sample universe developed from the Bureau of the Census 2002 data) published by the Office of Advocacy at the Small Business Administration