406 Int. J. Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Vol. 14, No.

3, 2011

The effects of demographic characteristics on

entrepreneurial intention in the pre-venture stage of
entrepreneurship

Adnan Ozyilmaz
Department of Business Administration,
Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences,
Mustafa Kemal University,
Tayfur Sokmen Campus, 31100 Antakya-Hatay, Turkey
Fax: 0 (326)-245-5854
E-mail: ozyila@yahoo.com

Abstract: Individuals’ entrepreneurial intentions are the foundations of

new-organisation creation. Using the demographic-characteristics approach
of entrepreneurship as its basis, this study examines the effects of selected
demographic characteristics on pre-venture entrepreneurial intentions.
This study analysed the responses of 698 undergraduate university students to
a questionnaire to test its hypotheses. Statistical analyses found significant
and positive relationships between both being a male and having an
entrepreneur-parent role-model and having entrepreneurial intentions for
business-administration students, but the entrepreneur-parent role-model
was the sole significant and positive predictor of engineering students’
entrepreneurial intentions. Age was not a significant predictor of entrepreneurial
intentions for undergraduate students. This study’s findings do not support
birth-order argument. Implications and future research directions are also
discussed.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; entrepreneurial intention; pre-venture stage of

entrepreneurship; demographic characteristics.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Ozyilmaz, A. (2011)

‘The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention in the
pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship’, Int. J. Entrepreneurship and Small
Business, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp.406–424.

Biographical notes: Adnan Ozyilmaz received his MBA from Fairleigh

Dickinson University, NJ and PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY,
USA. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Management and Organisation
at Mustafa Kemal University (MKU), Hatay, Turkey and the Director of the
Center for Strategic Research at MKU. His primary research interests include
entrepreneurship, strategic management of technological innovation,
management of technological organisation and service innovation. He has
many publications on these three main topics in national and international
journals. He teaches corporate entrepreneurship, organisation theory and
entrepreneurship. His current research specifically centres on estimating
entrepreneurial intentions of university students in terms of their demographic
characteristics.

Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention 407

1 Introduction

It has been well established that people’s entrepreneurial intentions constitute the
foundations for the creation of new organisations and therefore, precede the activities
involved in developing these organisations (Krueger, 1993; Shook et al., 2003). Indeed,
Forbes (1999) developed a framework to depict the cognitive states in the development of
new ventures, mainly in the pre-venture and post-venture stages, with intention as the last
step of the pre-venture stage. To predict entrepreneurial intention in the pre-venture stage,
three approaches have been mostly used. These approaches are cognitive approach
(Ajzen, 1991; Krueger et al., 2000; Shapero and Sokol, 1982), personality-traits approach
(Mueller and Thomas, 2001) and demographic-characteristics approach (Davidsson,
1995; Van Auken et al., 2006).
Two theoretical models in cognitive approach have been postulated to predict
entrepreneurial intention in the pre-venture stage, Ajzen’s (1991) theory of planned
behaviour (TPB) and Shapero and Sokol’s (1982) model of entrepreneurial event (SEE).
Both the TPB and SEE models discard the direct effects of exogenous influences,
such as demographic characteristics of individuals, to predict intentions or behaviour.
Demographic characteristics are discussed to have only an indirect effect on
entrepreneurial intentions through their effects on cognitive factors (Kolvereid, 1997).
Krueger et al. (2000) claimed that Shapero’s 1982 model of entrepreneurial event (SEE)
is the best predictor of entrepreneurial intentions. However, Krueger’s et al. (2000) study
failed to explain most of the variance in estimating entrepreneurial intentions, and no
single study has simultaneously compared the predictive ability of both cognitive and
demographic-characteristics approaches on the same sample in the pre-venture stage of
entrepreneurship to determine which approach predicts entrepreneurial intentions better.
Also, only few studies have used demographic-characteristics approach to predict
entrepreneurial intentions in the pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship, and many of these
only predicted entrepreneurial intention in its post-venture stage. For example, Mueller
(2004) found that fewer studies have compared females and males in the pre-venture
stage than those comparing them in the post-venture stage. The practice of predicting
entrepreneurial intention by investigating existing entrepreneurs may be misleading due
to important time lags problem (Reynolds, 1994). Therefore, this present study fills in the
gap in the pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship in terms of investigating the effect of
demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intentions.
This study’s research question was, “Do individuals’ demographic characteristics
have an impact on their entrepreneurial intentions in the pre-venture stage of
entrepreneurship?” To address this research question, this paper’s second section presents
a brief review of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intentions. Section 3 provides
hypotheses to test for the effects of gender, age, birth order and role model on
entrepreneurial intentions. Section 4 describes the sample, measures and survey
instrument. Section 5 presents the statistical results. Its final section presents conclusions,
implications and limitations and makes suggestions for future research.
408 A. Ozyilmaz

2 Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intention

In line with the definition of entrepreneurship as the creation of new organisations

(Aldrich, 1999; Brush et al., 2008; Schumpeter, 1934), this study defines
entrepreneurship as an individual’s intentional act of:
1 setting up his or her own completely new organisation
2 taking over a family organisation and reorganising or restructuring it to take full
advantage of a new opportunity and to reach larger markets and new customers with
the intention of achieving his or her own unique objectives.
This relatively extended definition of entrepreneurship considers it as new-organisation
creation, small-business creation and innovation. The creation of a new organisation is
entrepreneurial because it requires fundamental strategic and structural decisions
(Gartner, 1988). Similarly, reorganising a family business to benefit from new
opportunities is entrepreneurial because it requires fundamental changes in predominant
strategic, structural, decision-making, market selection and new product patterns (Sharma
and Chrisman, 1999).
Crant (1996) defined entrepreneurial intention, this study’s dependent variable, as an
individual’s judgements about the likelihood of owning his/her own business, and noted
that it should be considered to be an initial step in a long, evolving process. Because
entrepreneurial intentions constitute the foundations of new-organisation creation, it is
necessary to investigate them in order to fully understand entrepreneurship (Krueger,
1993). Organisation theory also considers organisation creation to be an intentional act by
individuals (Katz and Gartner, 1988; Shook at al., 2003). As this review has shown, the
literature generally accepts that intentions are predictors of future behaviour, so this study
therefore uses students’ entrepreneurial intentions as a predictor of their future
entrepreneurial behaviour.

3 Hypotheses

The demographic characteristics approach of entrepreneurship revealed birth order,

having a role model, marital status, age, parents’ and personal educational level, gender,
previous work experience and work habits to be the best individual demographic
predictors of entrepreneurial behaviour (Brockhaus and Horwitz, 1986; Robinson et al.,
1991). This present study employed a subset of the many different demographic
characteristics used to predict entrepreneurial behaviour in the post-venture stage of
entrepreneurship to investigate the influence of demographic characteristics on such
intention in the pre-venture stage. The subset includes gender, age, birth order and having
a role model.

3.1 Gender
Research in entrepreneurship has indicated gender differences (Brush, 2006; DeTienne
and Chandler, 2007; Johnson and Storey, 1994) and similarities (Ahl, 2004; Gatewood
et al., 2003) in the post-venture stage of entrepreneurship. In a cross-national assessment
 The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention 409

of entrepreneurship, which included Turkey, Bosma and Harding (2006) found that males
are more likely than females to initiate a venture without respect to their country’s level
of development. Özalp Türetgen et al. (2008) argued that gender inequalities exist in
many different forms in many cultures.
Among the few studies in the pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship, Kolvereid (1997)
found a significant positive correlation between entrepreneurial intentions and gender in a
study of 143 first-year undergraduate business-administration students in Sweden, with
males having more such intentions than females. Crant (1996) demonstrated a significant
positive relationship between gender and entrepreneurial intentions among undergraduate
and MBA students in a USA university, with males more likely to have entrepreneurial
intentions than females. Wilson et al. (2007) revealed that adolescent boys and men with
MBAs are more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions than did their female
counterparts. Davidsson (1995) demonstrated gender to be a direct predictor of
entrepreneurial intention. Tkachev and Kolvereid (1999), however, found gender to be an
insignificant predictor of entrepreneurial intentions among Russian medicine, odontology
and engineering students. Based on this discussion, this study therefore, postulates the
following hypothesis:
H1 An association exists between gender and the entrepreneurial intentions of
undergraduate business-administration and engineering student, in that this study
expect males to be more likely to express entrepreneurial intention than females.

3.2 Age

Previous studies of the demographic characteristics of existing entrepreneurs as Reynolds

(1995) and Brockhaus (1982) have considered individual age to be an important
demographic characteristic for both understanding existing entrepreneurial behaviour and
finding entrepreneurial intentions. Research indicated that both male and female
entrepreneurship is the most active after the age of 25 (Bosma and Harding, 2006;
Lévesque and Minniti, 2006).
It is problematic whether age 25 is a real threshold, as it may be argued that there is
no magic to the 25-year-old threshold and that the entrepreneurship age pattern varies
considerably across industries and countries. Dobrev and Barnett (2005) have suggested
that finding any age effect at all requires looking at individuals throughout the course of
their lives. It may therefore be argued that age-effect studies should avoid considering
only narrow age spans. However, it is reasonable to speculate, as this study does, that its
sample population’s older students may have more entrepreneurial intentions than its
younger students, as those studies cited earlier have indicated that entrepreneurship is
most active after the age of 25. This indicates that it is reasonable for this study to
hypothesise that students close to the age-25 threshold may have different rates of
entrepreneurial intention than younger students. This study therefore proposes the
following hypothesis:
H2 An association exists between age and the entrepreneurial intentions of
undergraduate business-administration and engineering students, in that this study
expects older students to be more likely to express entrepreneurial intentions than
younger ones.
410 A. Ozyilmaz

3.3 Birth order

A problem exists with the enduring stereotypes of entrepreneurship also embracing
such birth-order stereotypes as the rebellious, altruistic, liberal, open-minded,
adventurous, rule-breaking attributes of younger siblings and the conformist,
conservative, closed-minded, authoritarian, conventional, defensive traits of first-borns
(Sulloway, 1999). This dissimilarity between siblings is a result of rivalry between
first-borns, who defend their privileges or special status, and later-borns, who try to
maximise love and attention from their parents and therefore, reject the status quo and try
creative ways to subvert it, making later-borns more open to experience and, as a result,
to making creative breakthroughs, and first-borns tend to reject new ideas and be
comfortable with the status quo (Sulloway, 1999). Because entrepreneurship requires the
creating, reorganising, or restructuring of an organisation, according to the Sulloway’s
(1999) line of reasoning later-borns tend to be particularly open to trying new things,
making them more likely to be entrepreneurial, whereas first-borns tend to be more
closed-minded, conservative, conventional and defensive, making them less likely to be
entrepreneurial.
This line of argument can also be considered the other way around. Watkins and
Watkins (1983) found first-born children also tend to have different values and attitudes
than those of later-borns, such as having more positive attitudes towards achievement and
responsibility-seeking, behaviours important for choosing entrepreneurship as a career.
The conformist or conservative traits of first-borns tend to make them identify themselves
with parents, and consequently push them to work for family businesses which need them
or for someone else to earn extra income to cover family expenses when other siblings
are too young to do so. This provides them with experience and makes them
well-informed, and therefore, the best candidates to take responsibility for their family
businesses or to set up their own when they are able to do so.
Meanwhile, sheltered from the urgent need to support their families by working,
later-borns have more alternatives or other opportunities to consider than their first-born
siblings. The first-order argument of entrepreneurship based on McClelland’s (1961)
achievement thesis supports Watkins and Watkins’s (1983) line of reasoning. It maintains
that first-borns have more need for achievement and a greater desire to succeed and excel
personally at some challenging activity, such as initiating a new venture or reorganising a
current one, than their younger siblings and are therefore willing to take intermediate
levels of risk and to accept personal responsibility for their endeavours’ successes or
failures rather than leave the outcome to the actions of others. Therefore, contrary to
Sulloway’s (1999) line of argument, they are more likely to be entrepreneurial than later-
borns.
McClelland (1961, p.374), however, took a different approach and explained the
cause of first-borns’ perceived higher need for achievement as being “presumably
because their achievement-oriented parents can set higher standards, be more
affectionate, with one child than with several”. This means that it is not the birth
sequence itself, but the special attention achievement-oriented parents pay to their
first-born children that make them more achievement-oriented and therefore more likely
to be entrepreneurial.
Studies conducted mainly in the West have provided empirical support for
McClelland’s (1961) first-order argument. For example, Bowen and Hisrich (1986,
 The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention 411

p.393) found that women entrepreneurs in the USA are “relatively likely to have been
first-born or only children”, and Goldberg and Wooldridge (1993, p.55) found that
“first-born children, particularly males, are more likely to join and inherit a family
business”. Furthermore, first-born children are more likely to be considered to have a
strong potential to become entrepreneurs (Stevenson, 1990). Finally, much early research
also found that both male and female entrepreneurs tended to be their parents’ first
children (Neider, 1987; Sexton and Kent, 1981). Roberts (1991), who found no first-born
effect for high-technology entrepreneurs, appears to be an exception. Based on this
discussion, this study therefore proposes the following hypothesis:
H3 An association exists between birth order and the entrepreneurial intentions of
undergraduate business-administration and engineering students, in that this study
expects first-born students to be more likely to express entrepreneurial intentions
than later-borns.

3.4 Role model

Role modelling occurs when one person observes another’s social behaviour (an
identifactory event) informally and than adopts it and acts upon it (Bandura, 1977).
Social-learning theory defines identifactory events as the core of modelling (Bandura,
1969). Learning in role modelling therefore comes from observation, such as working in
parents’ businesses that provides opportunities for children to observe their parents’
behaviour. The process of learning by observation can result in the observers, in this case
the children of entrepreneur parents, adopting their model’s behaviour, in this case
entrepreneurship. Parental role models shape children’s preferences for careers through
observational learning and modelling (Bandura, 1977), and such career preferences are
especially more likely among those whose experience involves perceptions of success by
their entrepreneurial parents (Scherer et al., 1989).
The family is the social context in which children can gain information about
self-employment (Aldrich and Kim, 2007) and experiences with the potential to affect
their decisions to choose self-employed careers. They may acquire this experience by
helping with their parents’ businesses when needed, especially during high-demand
seasons or when one or more employees unexpectedly leave, take a leave of absence, or
take long sick leaves. Helping family businesses when needed is particularly evident in
Turkey due to its cultural values in regard to family, which is at the heart of every aspect
of social life in both rural and urban Turkey, regardless of region (Kabasakal and Bodur,
2002). Children in Turkey learn to be supportive and helpful for their families, even after
they marry and move into their own homes (Kabasakal and Bodur, 2007). The degree
family members accept their need to serve such unique family needs as described is
called in-group family collectivism, which is very prevalent in Turkey (Kabasakal and
Bodur, 2007). Family influence is entrenched in most business life, as many private
Turkish companies are managed by close family members instead of professional
managers (Fikret Paşa et al., 2001)
Empirical evidence in the pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship provided support for
the importance of having an entrepreneur-parent role model for a student to be an
entrepreneur. For example, Scott and Twomey (1988) demonstrated that students whose
parents are small-business owners showed a greater preference for self-employment and
412 A. Ozyilmaz

less preference for employment in large businesses than others. Van Auken et al. (2006)
also reported that direct model-respondent interactions have a significant impact on
students majoring in business administration and others wanting to start new businesses,
which occurs mainly through their having taken part in businesses and having
had positive discussions with their role models. Davidsson (1995) revealed that in
Sweden the role-model effect have direct and positive effects on entrepreneurial
intention. Kolvereid (1997) found a significant positive correlation between prior
self-employment experience and self-employment intentions among Norwegian first-year
undergraduate business-administration students, with those having prior entrepreneurial
experience being more inclined towards entrepreneurship than those without such
experience. Crant (1996) also found a significant positive relationship between parental
role models and entrepreneurial intentions, with those who have entrepreneurial mothers
or fathers being more entrepreneurially inclined than those who do not. Tkachev and
Kolvereid (1999), however, found only self-employment experience, and not having an
entrepreneurship family background, to be positively correlated with the self-employment
intentions of Russian students majoring in medicine, odontology and engineering. Based
on the preceding discussion and Turkish culture’s strong in-family collectivism, this
study proposes the following hypothesis:
H4 An association exists between having an entrepreneur-parent role model and the
entrepreneurial intentions of undergraduate business-administration and engineering
students, in that this study expects those students having an entrepreneur-parent role
model to be more likely to express entrepreneurial intentions than those students
having no entrepreneur-parent role model.

4 Method

4.1 Sample
To test the relationships between gender, age, birth order and role model and
entrepreneurial intentions, this study prepared a questionnaire for a sample of students
in the business-administration departments of 10 different Turkish state universities
and in the engineering school at one of these universities. Assistant professors at the
state universities were contacted to ask for their help in administering the questionnaire.
The sample included all those students attending the participating assistant
professors’ courses on the day they administered the questionnaires, which means it is
non-random. The survey’s administrators provided their samples with a brief
introduction about this study’s objectives. The overall sample size was 698 students, of
which 538 were fourth-year business-administration students from all ten universities
and 160 were fourth-year engineering students from University A. All the university
names have been disguised to protect confidentiality, so this article will refer to its
participating universities by letters. Due to intentional processes’ sensitivity to initial
conditions (Kim and Hunter, 1993), it is a common practice to use student samples
for predicting entrepreneurial intention (Krueger et al., 2000). Therefore, the university
students’ youth is favourable for this study, as it is interested in predicting
their entrepreneurial intentions.
 The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention 413

4.2 Measures
This study’s objective was to investigate the relationship between the demographic
characteristics of university students and their entrepreneurial intentions. Its independent
variables are gender (male or female), age (below age 24 or age 24 and older), birth order
(first-born or later-born) and having a role model (self-employed or entrepreneur parents
or waged-or-salaried, non-entrepreneur parents). This study categorised students as
having an entrepreneurial-parent role model when at least one of their parents owned a
business. It coded students as ‘1’ for being male, below age 24, first-born, or having an
entrepreneur-parent role model and ‘0’ for being female, age 24 or older, later-born, or
not having an entrepreneur-parent role model, making all the independent variables
binary dichotomous variables. The procedure of classifying demographic variables as
binary dichotomous variables is a common practice within the entrepreneurship literature
(Carrol and Mosakowski, 1987).
This study measured entrepreneurial intentions with two questionnaire items, which
were:
a “the probability of setting up your own business in the three years after graduation”
b “the probability of your expanding your father’s or mother’s business in the three
years after graduation”.
Similar items have previously been used to measure entrepreneurial intentions (Crant,
1996; Davidsson, 1995; Krueger et al., 2000) and to predict employment-status intentions
(Kolvereid, 1997). This study therefore considered the intention to initiate a new
business, to expand a family business, or both to be positive intentions towards
entrepreneurial behaviour. The questionnaire directed students to respond to these
statements on a four-point scale ranging from very low to very high. This study rated
those students marking their responses to these two questions as high or very high as
having entrepreneurial intentions and those responding otherwise as having no
entrepreneurial intentions, and coded those students having entrepreneurial intention as
‘1’ and those having no entrepreneurial intention as ‘0’, clearly making its dependent
variable of entrepreneurial intention a binary dichotomous variable.

5 Results

This study’s objective was to investigate the influence of demographic characteristics on

entrepreneurial intention. Before testing the hypotheses, this study needed to make sure
that the data collected from the business-administration departments and engineering
schools were homogeneous so that this study could safely combine them for further
analysis at a univariate setting. To do that, the study used 85 samples from fourth-year
business-administration students and 160 samples from fourth-year engineering
students at University A to test for homogeneity. The study then performed χ2
tests of independence (p = .05). The results of these tests1 showed that fourth-year
business-administration and engineering students at University A are significantly
different from each other in terms of gender, age, birth order, role model
414 A. Ozyilmaz

and entrepreneurial intentions. As the data collected from the fourth-year

business-administration and engineering students of University A were heterogeneous, it
was impossible to investigate the combined sample further, and this study had to treat the
business-administration and engineering students’ samples differently. This study
therefore tested the hypotheses and will present the results as two different studies, study
one and study two, with study one addressing the data collected from the fourth-year
business-administration students of the 10 different state universities and study two the
data from the fourth-year engineering students at University A.

5.1 Study one

Table 1 shows the frequencies of the sample and the variables measured. Of the total
sample of 538 fourth-year business-administration students at ten different state
universities, 249 were male, 408 were below the age of 24, 206 were first-born, 267
had at least one entrepreneur parent as a role model and 223 had entrepreneurial
intentions.
Because the sample included students from ten different universities, this
study needed to control for this to make sure that the sample was homogeneous across
them, so χ2 tests of independence were performed to reveal whether significant
differences existed in respect to the variables among the ten subgroups of universities and
the two student subgroups of those having entrepreneurial intentions and those having no
entrepreneurial intentions. Table 2 shows the results of these tests. None of the
universities is significantly different from the others in terms of the dependent and
independent variables (p = .05). The data collected from the different universities can
therefore be considered homogeneous in respect to the dependent and independent
variables, making it possible to investigate the relationship between these variables
further.
This study again performed χ2 tests of independence to discover any
relationships between entrepreneurial intention and the demographic characteristics.
As the second part of Table 2 shows, those who have entrepreneurial intentions
and those who have no entrepreneurial intentions differed in respect to gender
(p = .000) and role model (p = .000), making role model and gender the two significant
predictors of entrepreneurial intention and age and birth order insignificant as
predictors.
A binary logistic-regression analysis was performed between the same dependent and
all four independent variables in order to investigate further the results of the χ2 tests in a
multivariate setting. This present study used binary logistic-regression analysis because
of the nature of the hypotheses and the sample’s binary dichotomous dependent and
independent variables. The significance of each of the variables in the binary
logistic-regression analysis was measured in terms of Wald’s statistical test. As it may be
observed in Table 3, gender and role model exhibited significant values (p < .001). The
overall significance of the regression coefficients was assured by model χ2 of 106.078
(df = 2, p < .001), guaranteeing the overall significance of the model. Hosmer-Lemeshow
test was also performed to analyse the goodness-of-fit of the model. The results indicated
that the model provided a good fit with the model. The model is therefore suitable for the
purpose, considering its highly significant goodness-of-fit χ2 and high predictive ability
(correct classification = 70.3%).
 Entrepreneurial
intention
Table 1
Total University University University University University University University University University University
Variable
sample A B C D E F G I J K No Have
intention intention
Gender Frequency
(%)
Male 249 (46.3) 42 (49.4) 31 (56.4) 23 (38.3) 9 (25.7) 25 (42.4) 27 (50.9) 22 (48.9) 31 (50.8) 22 (46.8) 17 (44.7) 106 143
(33.7) (64.1)
Female 289 (53.7) 43 (50.6) 24 (43.6) 37 (61.7) 26 (74.3) 34 (57.6) 26 (49.1) 23 (51.1) 30 (49.2) 25 (53.2) 21 (55.3) 209 80
(66.3) (35.9)
Age
Below 24 408 (75.8) 60 (70.6) 45 (81.8) 47 (78.3) 24 (68.6) 52 (88.1) 41 (77.4) 34 (75.6) 49 (80.3) 34 (72.3) 22 (57.9) 246 162
(78.1) (72.6)
24-years and 130 (24.2) 25 (29.4) 10 (18.2) 13 (21.7) 11 (31.4) 7 (11.9) 12 (22.6) 11 (24.4) 13 (27.7) 13 (27.7) 16 (42.1) 69 61
above (21.9) (27.4)
Birth order
First-born 206 (38.3) 22 (25.9) 24 (43.6) 20 (33.3) 16 (45.7) 26 (44.1) 27 (50.9) 13 (28.9) 24 (39.3) 21 (44.7) 13 (34.2) 113 93
(35.9) (41.7)
Later-born 332 (61.7) 63 (74.1) 31 (56.4) 40 (66.7) 19 (54.3) 33 (55.9) 26 (49.1) 31 (71.1) 37 (60.7) 26 (55.3) 25 (658) 202 130
(64.1) (58.3)
Role model (have an
entrepreneur father
or mother or not)
Have a role 267 (49.6) 36 (42.4) 23 (41.8) 28 (46.7) 14 (40.0) 31 (52.5) 33 (62.3) 24 (53.3) 33 (54.1) 22 (46.8) 23 (60.5) 115 152
model (36.5) (68.2)
No role model 271 (50.4) 49 (57.6) 32 (58.2) 32 (53.3) 21 (60.0) 28 (47.5) 20 (37.7) 21 (46.7) 28 (45.9) 25 (53.2) 15 (39.5) 200 71
(63.5) (31.8)
Entrepreneurial
intention
Have intention 223 (41.4) 39 (45.9) 27 (49.1) 21 (35.0) 12 (34.3) 25 (42.4) 25 (47.2) 20 (44.4) 24 (39.3) 15 (31.9) 15 (39.5) - -
The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention

No intention 315 (58.6) 46 (54.1) 28 (50.9) 39 (65.0) 23 (65.7) 34 (57.6) 28 (52.8) 25 (55.6) 37 (60.7) 32 (68.1) 23 (60.5) - -
ten different state universities and their entrepreneurial intentions, respectively)a

Notes: aN = 538; the odds ratios: male = 1.35, female = 0.38; age (below 24) = 1.11, age (24-years and above) = 0.88; first-born = 0.82, later-born = 0.64; have an
entrepreneur-parent role model = 1.32, no entrepreneur-parent role model = 0.35
Frequencies of samples and variables (fourth-year business administration students of
415
416 A. Ozyilmaz

The logistic-regression analysis showed the sign of the relationship between gender and
role model and entrepreneurial intention to be positive. The positive sign for the gender
independent variable in the logistic-regression analysis indicated that the sample’s male
students were more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions than their female
counterparts. The positive sign for the role-model variable in the same analysis indicated
that the students with entrepreneur parents were more likely to have entrepreneurial
intentions than those from non-entrepreneurial parents. These results can also be
confirmed by investigating the frequency distribution presented in Table 1. In addition,
no multicollinearity problem exists between the independent variables in the data set
collected from study one’s sample.2 Therefore, based on the results of the χ2 tests and the
logistic-regression analysis, being a male and having an entrepreneurial-parent
role model are clearly two predictors of entrepreneurial intention of fourth-year
business-administration students. These findings confirm hypotheses one and four and
reject hypotheses two and three.
Table 2 Results of univariate tests – χ2 tests of independence (fourth-year business
administration students of ten different state universities and their entrepreneurial
intentions, respectively)a

Ten different universities Entrepreneurial intention

Variable
Df χ value
2
p Df χ2 value p
b
Gender 9 11.559 0.239 1 48.733 0.000*
Agec 9 16.163 0.064 1 2.116 0.146
d
Birth order 9 14.860 0.095 1 1.879 0.170
Role modele 9 10.925 0.281 1 52.331 0.000*
Entrepreneurial 9 6.615 0.667 - - -
intentionf
Notes: aN= 538; bmale = 1, female = 0; cbelow 24 = 1, 24 years old and above = 0;
d
first-born = 1, later-born = 0; ehave a role model (have an entrepreneur father or
mother) = 1; do not have a role model = 0; fhave an entrepreneurial intention = 1;
do not have an entrepreneurial intention = 0
*Significant at p < .05
Table 3 Binary logistic regression coefficients of the demographic characteristics influencing
entrepreneurial intentions (fourth-year business administration students of ten
different state universities)a

95% CI for Exp β

Variable Df β(SE) Wald
Lower Exp β Upper
Constant 1 1.764* (0.271) 42.293 0.171
Gender 1 1.359* (0.200) 46.320 2.631 3.891 5.775
Age 1 –0.116 (0.227) 0.264 0.571 0.890 1.388
Birth order 1 0.297 (0.201) 2.195 0.909 1.346 1.994
Role model 1.387 (0.198) 49.118 2.715 4.002 5.898
a 2
Notes: N = 538; R = 0.991 (Hosmer and Lemeshow), 0.179 (Cox and Snell), 0.241
(Nagelkerke); model χ2 (2) = 106.078, p < .001; *p < .001
 The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention 417

5.2 Study two

As mentioned previously, this study collected data from a sample of 160 fourth-year
engineering students at University A to test its hypotheses for engineering students. Table
4 presents the frequencies of study two’s samples and variables. Of the 160 students in
the sample, 138 were male, 136 were below age 24, 62 were first-borns, 90 had at least
one entrepreneur-parent as a role model and 95 had entrepreneurial intentions.
The χ2 tests of independence were conducted to reveal the relationships between their
entrepreneurial intentions and gender, age, birth order and role model. Table 5 presents
the results, which may be summarised as those who had entrepreneurial intentions and
those who did not differed only in respect to role model (p = .001), with no significant
difference in regard to entrepreneurial intentions associated with gender, age and birth
order.
Table 4 Frequency of samples and variables (fourth-year engineering students of University A
and their entrepreneurial intentions, respectively)a

Variable Total sample Not intention Have intention Odds ratio

Gender Frequency (%)
Male 138 (86.3) 53 (81.5) 85 (89.5) 1.60
Female 22 (13.8) 12 (18.5) 10 (10.5) 0.76
Age
Below 24 136 (85.0) 57 (87.7) 79 (83.2) 1.39
24 years and above 24 (15.0) 8 (12.3) 16 (16.8) 2.00
Birth order
First-born 62 (38.8) 28 (43.1) 34 (35.8) 1.21
Later-born 98 (61.3) 37 (56.9) 61 (64.2) 1.65
Role model
Have a role model 90 (56.3) 23 (35.4) 67 (70.5) 2.68
No role model 70 (43.8) 42 (64.4) 28 (29.5) 0.67
a
Note: N = 160
Table 5 Results of univariate tests – χ2 tests of independence (fourth-year engineering students
of University A and their entrepreneurial intentionsf)a

Variable Df χ2 value p
b
Gender 1 2.049 0.152
Agec 1 0.622 0.430
Birth orderd 1 0.864 0.353
e
Role model 1 19.367 0.000*
a b c
Notes: N = 160; Male = 1, Female = 0; below 24 = 1, 24 years old and above = 0;
d
first-born = 1, later-born = 0; ehave a role model (have an entrepreneur father or
mother) = 1; do not have a role model = 0; fhave an entrepreneurial intention = 1;
do not have an entrepreneurial intention = 0. *Significant at p < .001.
418 A. Ozyilmaz

A binary logistic-regression analysis was also performed between the same dependent
and all four independent variables for the study two to investigate further the results of
the χ2 tests on those students having and not having entrepreneurial intentions in a
multivariate setting. Wald’s statistical test, model χ2 and Hosmer-Lemeshow test were
also performed. Table 6 shows the results of these tests. The binary logistic-regression
model has a model χ2 of 21.809 (df = 1, p < .001), indicating a good-fitting model.
The model is therefore suitable for the purpose, considering its highly significant
goodness-of-fit χ2 and high predictive ability (correct classification = 68.8%).
Table 6 Binary logistic regression coefficients of the demographic characteristics influencing
entrepreneurial intentions (fourth-year engineering students of University A)a

95% CI for Exp β

Variable Df β(SE) Wald
Lower Exp β Upper
Constant 1 –0.565 (0.710) 0.632 0.568
Gender 1 0.591 (0.500) 1.397 0.678 1.806 4.811
Age 1 –0.350 (0.500) 0.489 0.264 0.705 1.878
Birth order 1 –0.104 (0.360) 0.083 0.445 0.901 1.824
Role model 1.459* (0.710) 17.566 2.174 2.174 8.508
a 2
Notes: N = 160; R = 3.322 (Hosmer and Lemeshow), 0.127 (Cox and Snell), 0.172
(Nagelkerke); model χ2(1) = 21.809, p < .001; *p < .001.

Binary logistic-regression analysis revealed the same results of the χ2 tests of

independence for the study two (p = .001). The logistic-regression analysis found that of
the variables this study has considered, role model is the sole predictor of the
entrepreneurial intentions of fourth-year engineering students. The logistic-regression
analysis showed the sign of the relationship between role model and entrepreneurial
intention to be positive. The positive sign for the role model independent variable in the
logistic-regression analysis indicated that the sample’s students having entrepreneur
parents were more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions than its students having no
entrepreneur parents. These results can also be confirmed by investigating the frequencies
presented in Table 4. Accordingly, hypothesis four is accepted and hypotheses one, two
and three are rejected for fourth-year engineering students.
It is worth noting that gender is not a significant predictor of fourth-year engineering
students’ entrepreneurial intentions, but is a significant positive predictor of fourth-year
business-administration students’ entrepreneurial intentions. None of the variance-
inflation factor and tolerance values indicated the availability of colinearity between the
independent variables in the dataset.3

6 Discussion

One of this study’s major contributions to our understanding of the pre-venture stage of
entrepreneurship is its finding that the influence of gender on entrepreneurial intention
depends on the type of professional education an individual pursues. For those pursuing a
professional business-administration education the gender effect is obvious, with male
students being more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions than their female
 The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention 419

counterparts, but for those pursuing a professional engineering education the gender
effect is insignificant, meaning that gender does not predict the likelihood of
entrepreneurial intentions. Even though the demographic-characteristics entrepreneurship
literature generally considers gender to be an important predictor of entrepreneurial
intention and behaviour, this study’s findings indicate that the presumed relationship may
depend on the type of professional education individuals seek. This conclusion has not
been reported previously in the literature about the pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship.
None of this study’s samples produced any evidence supporting the significance of
age or birth order on entrepreneurial intentions in the pre-venture stage of
entrepreneurship. The data showed no significant difference in entrepreneurial intentions
between students aged less than 24 and those aged 24 and over. Therefore, this finding
confirms those of such studies as Bosma and Harding (2006) and Lévesque and Minniti
(2006) that entrepreneurship increases after age 25. This is important, as real doubt has
existed about the importance of the threshold value of age 25.
Based on McClelland’s (1961) achievement thesis, first-order argument has received
widespread attention in entrepreneurship literature as a determinant of entrepreneurial
behaviour on theoretical and empirical grounds, mainly in Western cultures. However,
this study found no significant difference between younger siblings and first-born
siblings in its sample, discrediting the first-order argument of entrepreneurship in regard
to students’ entrepreneurial intentions in the pre-venture stage in Turkey.
This finding could be attributed to Turkish cultural value of high in-group family
collectivism. This means that neither Sulloway’s (1999) argument of sibling rivalry nor
McClelland’s (1961) achievement thesis as bases to explain birth order differences with
regard to entrepreneurship are applicable in Turkey due to Turkish culture’s in-group
family collectivism. This means that Turkish families strongly discourage sibling rivalry
and overwhelmingly pay no special attention to first-born children. To the contrary,
in-group family collectivism (Kabasakal and Bodur, 2007), requires that younger brothers
and sisters show respect to their elder siblings as long as they live, and that older siblings
be supportive of their younger siblings in every aspect of daily life as long as they live.
This study found that having an entrepreneur parent as a role model is the
most prominent predictor of entrepreneurial intention for both undergraduate
business-administration and engineering students in Turkey. This indicates that in the
pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship, whether a Turkish student’s parents are
entrepreneurs or not affects that student’s entrepreneurial intentions. Accordingly, those
who have an entrepreneur parent as a role model are more likely to have entrepreneurial
intentions than those who do not. This empirical result supports Bandura’s (1969) social-
learning theory used in this study as a base to explain the relationship between parental
role modelling and entrepreneurial intentions. On empirical grounds, this finding
conflicts with those of Tkachev and Kolvereid (1999) and Kolvereid (1997) and supports
those of Davidsson (1995) and Crant (1996). Therefore, the role-model effect on
entrepreneurial intentions varies with national cultures in the pre-venture stage, and that it
is therefore highly advisable to test theories of entrepreneurship within different contexts,
countries and cultures.
Some confounding variables might have influenced the results of this study. First is
that gender effect is insignificant for engineering students. That is likely due to the small
N for females. Therefore, future research need is warranted. Second, this study noted no
effect on age. But the outer range for the sample is not known. It is possible that because
420 A. Ozyilmaz

they are all fourth-year students that the bulk of the younger group are over 20 and even
22, and that the bulk of those in older group are 25 or 26. Thus, range is very narrow.

6.1 Implications
Previous research has shown the importance and relevance of demographic
characteristics in predicting entrepreneurial behaviour in its post-venture stage, but few
studies have addressed entrepreneurial intentions in its pre-venture stage. This study is a
step toward filling that void by investigating how individuals’ demographic
characteristics influence entrepreneurial intentions. It also supports and challenges some
theoretical models on empirical grounds, as some of its findings are similar to those of
previous studies conducted in other countries while some of them contradict others. It is
therefore necessary to discuss the implications of these findings to further our
understanding of entrepreneurial intention, both in Turkey and internationally.
This study’s findings and those of others conducted in many different countries
indicate that the ability to predict entrepreneurial intention by gender seems to be
subject-specific, depending on the subjects the studies consider and the countries and
cultures studied. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that the effect of gender needs
to be predicted for each subject, country and culture in order to understand local
situations as well as to increase the international community’s understanding of the
gender issue.
This study found no age or birth order influence on entrepreneurial intentions.
However, it must be noted that those studies finding the age variable to be significant
considered it as a life-course variable, whereas this study considered only a narrow age
range. Still, its findings do not challenge age 25 as the threshold year when individuals
seriously consider entrepreneurship, but support the observation that the threshold age is
not a younger one, at least in the Turkish-student context.
Although many studies have found birth order, especially in regard to being
first-born, significant in people’s decisions to choose entrepreneurship as a career, this
study found no difference in the entrepreneurial intentions of first-borns and later-borns.
This implies that, contrary to McClelland’s (1961) findings, the parents of university
students in Turkey tend to pay equal attention to all their children without regard to birth
order. It implies further that it is likely to be incorrect to stereotype first-born Turkish
students as being power-hungry conservatives with conformist traits and later-borns as
having rebellious, rule-breaking attributes. This may be so in other cultural contexts as
well, considering that democratic movements have dominated social, family and
organisational life during the past two decades in Turkey and in many other countries,
both developing and developed. Furthermore, it remains to be found whether the
differences attributed to exist between first-borns and later-borns are time-dependent,
becoming more significant later in life, or whether they may be observable only in the
post-venture stage of entrepreneurship but not in its pre-venture stage.
This study further found that it is likely to be incorrect to treat all undergraduate
students as a single population despite their academic disciplines, and then to try to
predict their entrepreneurial intentions based on this incorrect assumption, as it found that
fourth-year business-administration and engineering students differ significantly in this
regard and should not be treated as a homogeneous group, while business-administration
students at different universities may indeed be considered a homogeneous group in this
regard. This might be one reason why studies investigating the same relationship in
 The effects of demographic characteristics on entrepreneurial intention 421

different contexts, cultures and countries reach different results, such as noted earlier in
regard to gender. Although birth order is not a predictor of entrepreneurial intentions
among Turkish students, it may be a significant predictor of entrepreneurial intention in
other contexts.
Although this study has adopted the micro-level analysis of an individual
undergraduate student, considering students as research subjects provides macro-level
implications and benefits. It is timely and important to consider university students as
research subjects in regard to entrepreneurship in Turkey because the Turkish
government has in recent years initiated a programme through the Turkish Small and
Medium Industry Development Organisation (KOSGEB) to boost the number of
university-educated entrepreneurs by providing educational and financial assistance for
those university students who have an original business idea and plan. Policy audiences,
businesses and engineering and business schools are therefore likely to be especially
interested in knowing how likely business and engineering students are to take advantage
of this shift in government policy. Using students as research subjects is also likely to
reveal the orientation of the next generation of business leaders in terms of their
entrepreneurial intentions, which can in turn help direct the government’s funds
accordingly. Therefore, KOSGEB should look to support the children of entrepreneur
parents in order to boost the number of university-educated entrepreneurs required to
improve Turkey’s position in highly competitive global markets.

6.2 Limitations and future research needs

This study has some limitations that need to be considered when evaluating its findings.
Many previous entrepreneurship studies (Brush et al., 2008; Crant, 1996) have used all of
this study’s independent variables as control variables. Regrettably, one of this paper’s
shortcomings is its lack of control variables, as the suitability of those that it could have
used, such as socioeconomic status and industry, was uncertain. Previous studies of
entrepreneurship have reported mixed results for socioeconomic status, which cast doubt
on its suitability as a control variable. For example, Morris and Lewis (1995) found that
people with above-average financial and other difficulties fitting into society are more
likely to develop entrepreneurial tendencies than others, whereas Bosma and Harding
(2006) found in a cross-national study that people from wealthier backgrounds or with
better access to capital are more likely to start businesses. In addition, even though
industry is an important determinant of self-employment, this study could not use it as a
control variable because it is considering the pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship,
during which the eventual industry in which the entrepreneurship takes place is likely to
be unknown.
Student samples do remain somewhat controversial, as are such samples of managers
as Hofstede’s IBM samples, when used to generalise beyond the bounds of life stage or
occupation. Still, this study’s utilisation of a sample of students is justified because it is
interested in those factors which may influence the intentionality of potential
entrepreneurs toward entrepreneurial behaviour. This means that because this study’s
interest is in the pre-venture stage of entrepreneurship it was necessary to investigate the
extent to which critical demographic preconditions facilitate or restrict entrepreneurial
intentions (Krueger et al., 2000), and a student sample such this study’s provided such an
opportunity even though some may say that student sample lacks external validity.
422 A. Ozyilmaz

It would be useful to conduct a longitudinal study by having as many members of a

student sample respond to appropriately worded new questionnaires at ages 25, 30, 35
and 40 in order to overcome the problems involved with the differences between the
findings of pre-venture and post-venture studies. Although such longitudinal studies are
difficult and costly, they provide valuable information about such life-course variables as
progress from intentions to behaviour. Finally, this study used a non-random student
sample to test its hypotheses concerning the demographic predictors of entrepreneurial
intention. Even though it is particularly difficult to use a random-sampling procedure to
investigate a student sample involving different locations, doing so would increase the
soundness of the findings.

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Notes
1 Available upon request.
2 The results of the multicollinearity tests are available upon request.
3 The results of the multicollinearity tests are available upon request.