The STEP Project is in the process of developing the quantitative track of its research. Through this process, we are looking to make take a unique approach which will more accurately capture the complexity that surrounds family businesses.

The first distinctive feature of the survey comes with the unit of analysis. Rather than focusing on the family exclusively, the firm exclusively or the individual exclusively, we are looking at the entire business family group. Many families have a portfolio of businesses and we want to look the family's entire collection.

The majority of large scale survey research in family business thus far has been firm specific, completed by one person in the business, and with "family or non" used as a sort variable. This leads to interesting but certainly oversimplified comparisons between family and non-family firms in certain issues. In performance, for example, the claim is made that family firms perform better than non-family firms. This is an interesting and valuable result, but leads to the questions of how and why families gain a competitive advantage.

In order to address these questions, we are delving deeper into the entire family business system. Our survey will be multi rater (filled out by 10 or more family and non-family persons within a business group) and attempt to assess the family's influence on all aspects of the business. We are implementing new tactics such as applying the standard and validated Entrepreneurial Orientation scale to the family group level and trying to measure the family influence on specific firm resources.

We are excited about the results that this survey will produce: it is certainly not easy data to collect, but it will be very rich data.