Research On The Impact Of Individual Social Network On College Students Entrepreneurial Intention

In recent years, the employment situation of college students is becoming increasingly serious with the influence of some complicated factors such as the development of economic and social transformation and the expansion of higher education. Thus, how to solve the employment problems of college students has become the focus of the society. Encouraging college students to start their own business is one of the effective methods which chould solve the employment problems of college students. Entrepreneurship is the source of employment, entrepreneurship can not only help the entrepreneurs solve their employment problems, but also provide jobs for the community. Therefore, it could alleviate the employment pressure. However, China’s entrepreneurship rate of college students has been at a low level compared with the developed countries. Guiding college students’ entrepreneurial intention is an effective means to improve college students’ entrepreneurship rate. At present, scholars have paid more attention to “social network”, an important factor that influences the entrepreneurial intention.However, although the existing research has emphasized that individual social network has a significant effect on the entrepreneurial intention, there is a paradox about the functional mechanism between them. Around the above issues, this paper aims to solve the basic problem of “how individual social network influences college students entrepreneurial intention”, and tries to open the ‘black box’ of the mechanism. Particularly, based on the review and comment on some theories and literature, this paper has explored the following three research questions. First, What’s the relationship between individual social network and college students entrepreneurial intention? Second, what’s the mechanism of individual social network acting on entrepreneurial intention? Third, what’s the role of entrepreneurial resilience plays in the mechanism?Under the current China’s entrepreneurial environment, in order to explain the above questions clearly, this research proposes a theoretical model which is suitable to analyze the mechanism of individual social network acting on college students entrepreneurial intention based on the existing literature.This paper starts the empirical analysis mainly from two stages. The first stage is exploratory factor analysis(EFA), it could help select the suitable items of the initial questionnaire, and form the final questionnaire. The second stage is confirmatory factor analysis(CFA), which aims to verify the hypotheses and theoretical model by using structural equation model(SEM). The main conclusions are as followed after the empirical analysis of the 258 valid questionnaires.(1) Individual social network has a significant and positive effect on college students entrepreneurial intention.(2) Different dimentions of individual social network have different effects on college students entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial resilience.(3) Individual social network influences college students entrepreneurial intention through the mediating role of entrepreneurial resilience.(4) Different dimentions of entrepreneurial resilience have different effects on college students entrepreneurial intention.In summary, based on the theory of social network, resilience and entrepreneurial intention and focused on how individual social network influences college students entrepreneurial intention, this research comes up with three innovations as follows:(1) By introducing the concept of “resilience” and making it as a starting point, this paper explores the mechanism of how individual social network influences entrepreneurial intention, thus enriches the research perspective of entrepreneurial intention.(2) By exploring the mechanism of how individual social network influences entrepreneurial intention, this paper has enriched the research on antecedents of entrepreneurial resilience in the field of entrepreneurship research.(3) Have emphasized the important role of entrepreneurial resilience and discovered a new mechanism of “individual social network--entrepreneurial resilience--college students entrepreneurial intention”.