Sinazo Sixesha, John K. Aderibigbe, Tendai Chimucheka, Johan Delport
The study investigated South African university students’ entrepreneurship interest as a consequence of resilience and internal economic locus of control using explanatory survey research design, a validated questionnaire, a Raosoft sample size calculator, purposive and convenience sampling techniques to sample 419 male and female research participants. Moreover, the study is underpinned by the theory of entrepreneurial event. Three hypotheses were tested using the Pearson correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis respectively. The results of data analysis showed that there is a significant positive relationship between internal economic locus of control and entrepreneurship interest (r=0.240; p<0.01). The results further revealed that internal economic locus of control and resilience are statistically significant predictors of entrepreneurship interest (f=12.941; r2=0.054; p<0.01); while internal economic locus of control significantly predicts entrepreneurship interest, resilience was found significant but very weakly related to (r=0.091; p<0.05) but statistically not significant in predicting entrepreneurship interest (β=0.035; t=0.704; p>0.05). The study concludes that internal economic locus of control is one of the important contributing factors to university students’ entrepreneurship interest and recommends that stakeholders including government, non-governmental organisations, lecturers, related professionals, parents and care givers should help to facilitate internal economic locus of control and entrepreneurship interest of South African youths.