Entrepreneurship education in Portugal: 2004/2005 national survey

Education in entrepreneurship is a relatively new addition to the curriculum of institutions of higher education in Portugal. Forty-one percent of the current courses were first offered in 2003 or 2004. This recent awakening to the importance of entrepreneurship education is both reactive to the needs of the market as well as pro-active through the interests of professors. As the developing phenomenon of entrepreneurship education grows there is an urgent need to better understand and develop this area through academic research. Pedagogy, course content, the use of technology as well as other parallel initiatives related to entrepreneurship education in Portugal are the primary focus of this national survey of academic year 2004/2005. The majority (76.5%) of professors surveyed stated that their university has plans to create an entrepreneurship/innovation center. However, it is believed that roles and activities that a “center” must have to be effective are, as of yet, not well-defined in the Portuguese context. In developing future initiatives, Portugal could benefit by looking at models from other countries that have well-developed entrepreneurship educational offerings and support structures. Findings indicate that current course pedagogy in Portugal relies heavily on business plan creation and theoretical lectures and seldom makes use of computer business simulations, role-playing or internships. In addition, greater use of the Internet as a method for disseminating information to students and entrepreneurs could help “market” entrepreneurship education better and improve the perception of those students not currently taking an entrepreneurship course.

Semantics bias in cross-national comparative analyses : Is it good or bad to have "fair" health?

The Health Behavior in School-aged Children is a cross-national study collecting data on social and health indicators on adolescents in 43 countries. The study provides comparable data on health behaviors and health outcomes through the use of a common protocol, which have been a back bone of the study sine its initiation in 1983. Recent years, researchers within the study have noticed a questionable comparability on the widely used item on self-rated health. One of the four response categories to the item "Would you say your health is….?" showed particular variation, as the response category "Fair" varied from 20 % in Latvia and Moldova to 3-4 % in Bulgaria and Macedonia. A qualitative mini-survey of the back-translations showed that the response category "Fair" had a negative slant in 25 countries, a positive slant in 10 countries and was considered neutral in 9 countries. This finding indicates that there are what may be called semantic issues affecting comparability in international studies, since the same original word (in an English original) is interpreted differently across countries and cultures. The paper test and discuss a few possible explanations to this, however, only leaving to future studies to hold a cautious approach to international comparisons if working with the self-rated health item with four response categories.