Business Success, Social Support, and Community Connections Among Bedouin Women Entrepreneurs: A Convergent Mixed-Methods Study Integrating Quantitative Dyadic and Qualitative Interview Data

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Women’s entrepreneurship is embedded in family, community, and gender relations in marginalized contexts. This convergent mixed-methods study examined predefined business persistence and development status, subjective business success, and relational support among Bedouin women entrepreneurs. The quantitative component included 175 matched woman–man dyads who independently evaluated the businesses. The qualitative component included 24 linked dyads, with women’s and men’s interviews analyzed separately and then compared. Unadjusted comparisons showed higher subjective business-success ratings among both women and men associated with continuing/developed businesses; after demographic adjustment, the group difference remained significant for women’s ratings but not for men’s ratings. Women in the continuing/developed group also reported greater entrepreneurial empowerment, socioeconomic benefits, and immediate family support after adjustment, whereas the unadjusted group difference in men’s positive attitudes toward women’s entrepreneurship did not persist. Stronger endorsement of the importance of husband support was positively associated with subjective success among continuing/developed businesses, whereas the corresponding association was absent or reversed among early-closed businesses. Qualitative accounts portrayed family and male support as providing assistance, legitimacy, and resources while also operating through conditional approval, supervision, and restrictions on autonomy. Active-business accounts emphasized interconnected family, community, professional, and institutional resources, whereas closed-business accounts emphasized accumulating personal, familial, market, and structural vulnerabilities. Participants’ accounts portrayed support as more enabling when it expanded women’s autonomy and capacity to act, and as potentially constraining when tied to permission, monitoring, or conditional access to resources.