An empirical study on the relationship between background heterogeneity, entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial intention — Based on questionnaire survey to postgraduates in China

Abstract

This paper firstly builds a relational model between entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of university graduates by literature review and surveys to entrepreneurs. Then a type of questionnaire is designed to survey graduate students in five regions of China. Finally, we extract data from the recycling questionnaires and build up regression model to find out the influences of entrepreneurial attitudes (such as the cognitions to entrepreneurial purposes, qualities, competences and environment) and background differences on entrepreneurial intentions. This study shows that postgraduates' entrepreneurial intentions conform to the “two force driving” model, which consists of internal driving forces and external pulling power. Specifically, there is the background-differentiated effect owing to significant differences in entrepreneurial intentions of postgraduates in aspect of gender, parents' entrepreneurial experiences and household income. In addition, entrepreneurial attitudes have internal motivation-stimulated effect, quality-intensified effect, ability-combined effect and external environment-constrained effect on the promotion of entrepreneurial intentions.