Psychological Adjustment among Shopkeepers: The Role of Age, Gender, Education, and Years of Business Experience

Abstract

The process of psychological adjustment depends on how well people manage to cope with their occupational challenges; however, little is known about the situation regarding shopkeepers, particularly in the regions that had not been affected by the conflict in Pakistan. The study aimed at examining the relationship between age, sex, education, and professional experience of the Senegalese shopkeepers from Gujrat, Punjab, Pakistan. The study has used a cross-sectional design and a sample consisting of 200 adult shopkeepers. The research participants provided demographic information and completed a psychological adjustment questionnaire gathered according to the sample composed of people. The results obtained with the help of a multilayer perceptron neural network revealed that out of 137 cases 68.8% belonged to the training sample, and the remaining 62 (31.2%) were tested as a part of the testing sample. The prediction error for the training sample was .994, while that for the testing sample was 0.985, less the difference between the two, indicating better performance of predictions. In terms of predictor importance, Experience is the most significant predictor (normalized importance = 100%) followed by Education (82.7%), Age (81.0%), and Gender (32.0%). Overall, the model shows that Experience is the strongest predictor.