How do family support factors influence college students’ online-startup thinking?

The purpose of this study is to present the relationship between family support factors and Chinese college students’ online-startup thinking on live streaming platforms. Considering China's specific online entrepreneurial environment, this paper divides Chinese college students’ online-startup thinking according to the liberal–conservative thinking theory. This study classifies family support factors based on the tangible–intangible resource division theory. Different tangible and intangible factors have different impacts on their online-startup thinking.

This study tests 588 samples based on the partial least squares path modelling and variance-based structural equation modelling. This study promotes importance-performance map analysis to explore additional findings of influencing factors and provide suitable suggestions for Chinese college students and related departments.

Tangible family support factors, such as labour resources support, and intangible family support factors, such as verbal encouragement, can positively enhance Chinese college students’ liberal thinking to online-startup and decrease their conservative thinking. Meanwhile, according to importance-performance map analysis results, verbal encouragement from the intangible unit instead of financial resource support from the tangible unit has a higher total effect and performance on Chinese college students’ liberal thinking and conservative thinking.

This study draws on psychology research based on Chinese college students’ unique entrepreneurial mentality. This paper divides Chinese college students’ thinking in online-startups into liberal thinking and conservative thinking based on the liberal–conservative thinking theory. Meanwhile, according to the feature of Chinese family support factors, this paper classifies various elements based on the tangible–intangible resource division theory, which is helpful for scholars to understand that the student perceptions of the value of family support are critical to the success of the online-startup.