Survey instruments were randomly mailed or hand-delivered to a variety of New York
and Massachusetts companies which had been identified as family businesses. A net
distribution of 550 surveys yielded 159 usable returned, a 29% return rate. To improve
the earlier study (Sonfield & Lussier, 2002), the sample size was increased from 109 in
that study to 159 in this study, with the majority of the additional family firms being first
generation, which increased from 13 to 50, increasing reliability and validity of this
current study