Planned behaviour, gender, and attitudes towards entrepreneurship among business economics and electrical engineering students

This paper examines entrepreneurial intentions in the context of life course transitions among undergraduate students enrolled in the economics and electrical engineering faculties of the University of Belgrade. The entrepreneurial intention model is built upon the theory of planned behaviour, examining the associations between students’ willingness to become an entrepreneur, their attitudes and perceptions about the importance of subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control variables. The data comes from a self-administered survey. The results show that attitudes towards entrepreneurship and behavioural control factors form positive and statistically significant associations with students’ future entrepreneurial orientation, while subjective norms and risk-willingness add a little explanatory power to the initial regression models. In order to better understand the initial stage of life course transitions among the students, single regressions are estimated. All the factors appear as statistically significant with meaningful coefficient values, further showing that entrepreneurial prediction is highly gendered and depends on what faculty the student attends. This paper reveals for policy practitioners the main characteristics of young entrepreneurs-to-be and their understanding of the process of creating a business venture.