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INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN BUSINESS
their tendency to become entrepreneurs. Yordanova and Tarrazon (2002) also provided
empirical evidence that male have higher entrepreneurial intentions then females have
and that entrepreneurship related education, presence of entrepreneurial role model and
prestigious perception about entrepreneurial ship as occupation affect entrepreneurial
intentions positively. Moreover, Wilson et al. (2007) found that males have more self
efficiency (confidence) and intention to start their own venture than females. They also
found that entrepreneurial education increased the self efficiency of the female students
with comparison to the male students. Athayde (2009) provided ethnical explanation by
finding that in US young black people have stronger entrepreneurial intentions than white
or Asian young pupils. Many other explanations such as family business exposure were
also brought forward by researchers as determinates of entrepreneurial intentions. Carr
and Sequeira (2007), Raijman (2001) and Athayde (2009) found that family business
exposure and household economic resources also play a role to build entrepreneurial
intentions. Environmental explanations are also provided by some researchers as Bajaba
(2009) found that society‘s positive perceptions and trade connection have a significant
positive relationship with entrepreneurial intentions while access to capital was found to
be a significant barrier. Zhang et al. (2001) provided that males have strong shared
environmental influence on their entrepreneurial intention while females showed zero
shared environmental influence. Luthje and Franke (2003) also provided the support for
the affect of environmental factors and perceived contextual barriers on the
entrepreneurial intentions.
3. Research Methodology
3.1 Method
This study used survey questionnaire for the collection of data which contained three
sections. Section one consists of personal demographic, intentions about starting the
business and respondent‘s personal and family business exposure. Section two provides
five questions on the support factors that might contribute towards the entrepreneurial
intentions of the student in a positive way. Section three provides four questions about
the perceived barriers. The questions of section two and section three are measured on 5
point Likert scale.
3.2 Sample
We distributed a total of 350 questionnaires out of which 313 questionnaires received
back having response 89.42%. The questionnaires were distributed to the business
students of different universities of Punjab. We choose business students because they are
perceived to be the well aware of the business process and the requirement to start a new
enterprise. Moreover, the students are the youth which is supposed to be common pool
for the future entrepreneurs (Bajaba, 2009).
3.3 Hypothesis
The hypotheses of this study are as follows:
H1: There is positive relationship between support factors and entrepreneurial intentions
of business students.
H2: There is negative relationship between barriers and entrepreneurial intentions of
business students.
H3: There is positive relationship between personal business experience and
entrepreneurial intentions of business students.
COPY RIGHT © 2011 Institute of Interdisciplinary Business Research 208
JANUARY 2011
VOL 2, NO 9