The relationship between individual innovation, social entrepreneurship perceptions and sustainable development awareness of university students and investigation according to some variables

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between university students' perceptions of individual innovativeness and social entrepreneurship and their awareness of sustainable development and to examine this relationship according to some variables. The data collection tool used in the study consists of four parts. The first part consists of the Personal Information Form, the second part consists of the Individual Innovativeness Scale developed by Hurt, Joseph, and Cook (1977) and adapted into Turkish by Kılıçer and Odabaşı (2010), the third part consists of the Social Entrepreneurship Characteristics Scale developed by Konaklı and Göğüş (2013), and the fourth part consists of the Attitudes Towards Sustainable Development Scale developed by Baisutti and Frate (2017) and adapted into Turkish by Demirel and Sungur (2018). The population of the study consists of university students studying at Bingöl University in the 2019-2020 academic calendar year. The sample consists of students determined by simple random method, which is one of the probability-based sampling methods. In the analysis of the data, SPSS 22 package program was used for descriptive statistics and Mplus 8.3 package program was used to analyze the structural relationships between variables. The structural model created for mediation analysis was analyzed using Maximum Likelihood (ML) parameter estimation method since the data set meets the normality assumption and the variables are continuous. It was determined that university students' perceptions of individual innovativeness were at a high level in the individual innovativeness variable and the sub-dimensions of risk-taking, intellectual leadership and openness to experience, except for the sub-dimension of resistance to change, and similarly, their perceptions of social entrepreneurship were at a high level. Also, one of the conclusions of the research was that the university students' awareness of sustainable development was at a very high level. It was concluded that sustainable development has a moderate positive and significant relationship with individual innovativeness (r=.327, p<.01) and social entrepreneurship (r=.468, p<.01). Similarly it was concluded that there was a moderate positive and significant relationship between individual innovativeness and social entrepreneurship (r=.553, p<.01). As a result of the research, it was determined that social entrepreneurship has a full mediating role in the relationship between individual innovation and sustainable development.