This paper employs diffusion and farm-structure variables to explain variations in Montana farmers' adoption of two kinds of sustainable agricultural practices: those involving intensive management and those which require fewer purchased inputs. While perceived profitability was found to be the most important factor affecting adoption of both, the independent variables had different effects on beliefs about net economic returns as well as on adoption of the two practices. Type of farm enterprise played a larger role in adoption of the low-input practices than the management intensive ones; access to information was more important for the latter. Implications for policy are discussed.
Research evidence is presented to support a new and simple theory of attitude formation and change. This theory posits that the attitude of any individual converges overtime on the arithmetic mean of the attitude-pertinent information received by the individual. Consequently, the stability of an attitude is dependent on the number of messages out of which that attitude was formed. This formulation also implies that the emotional state or feelings of an individual and the degree of heterogeneity of influences to which he or she was exposed are unrelated to attitude change. Using a multi-stage, multi-time procedure, and instruments designed to detect and measure interpersonal influence, data provided by 135 high school students over a six-month interval support these hypotheses.While the notion that cognitive processing of information may be too complex and unpredictable to be represented by a few simple quantitative laws or principles remains a suspicion even among some social scientists, the last decade of empirical research has produced many cases in which some of these processes have been described quite accurately with very simple quantitative formulations. Cliff (1972), for example, asked 31 subjects to estimate the favorability of 10 adjectives describing personality traits on a series of nine point scales. Subjects also rated the favorableness of all possible pairs of these adjectives on the same scales. Cliff found that the favorability of the pairs of adjectives could be predicted very accurately by the average favorability of the two component adjectives, for example, L where a, = the favorableness of the first adjective, a2 = the favorableness of the second adjective, aI2 = the favorableness of the pair taken together.On the average, 96 percent of the variance in the favorability score of the pairs was accounted for by the simple average of their components. Monotonic transformations to account for potential curvilinearity were able to explain on the average only .025 additional percent of the variance.In a more complex survey design, Woelfel and Haller (1971) measured the status aspirations (i.e., levels of education and occupational prestige to which subjects aspire) of a set of 99 high school students, and showed that about half of the variance in these expectations could be accounted for by the average status expectations of a set of independently identified ''significant others" with whom the respondents reported communicating. In a study of the determinants of marijuana use, Woelfel and Hernandez (1972) found that 86 percent of the variance in rate of marijuana use by 341 U.S. and Canadian college students could be accounted for by a weighted average of the information about marijuana they reported having received. In this same vein, Reeves (1974) found that nearly half the variance in the extent to which young children see TV characters as real or fantasy can be accounted for by a weighted average of the opinions of a subset of their significant others. Woelfel, Woelfel, Gilham, and McPhail(l974)...
The effects of question order on respondents' ratings of general and specific aspects of community life were assessed using data from separate mail surveys in Montana and Pennsylvania, The samples differed in locale, composition, and size and the relevant questions varied in number, format, and specific focus. Nevertheless, for both data sets the general question was more likely to be answered and more likely to receive positive responses when it was asked after—rather than before—the specific questions. There was some indication that carryover from the specific items to the general question responses were somewhat greater for those questions asked most recently and less for those asked earlier. Implications of these findings are discussed.
Past research suggests that mail surveys encourage a primacy effect, which is a tendency to choose the first answers from a list, whereas telephone surveys encourage a recency effect, a tendency to choose the last answers from a list. This paper summarizes results from 82 new experiments conducted in 12 separate surveys in seven states. Only four of 33 mail survey comparisons exhibited significant primacy effects, while five of 26 experiments in telephone surveys exhibited recency effects. In addition, only three of 23 cross‐method comparisons produced a significant primacy/recency effect in the expected manner. The conclusion is that the prevalence of primacy and recency effects has been over‐estimated by past research and a new theoretical approach that takes into account multiple causation is needed for examining these effects.
The effects of previous victimization, distance from law enforcement and neighbors, and sufficiency of police patrols on fear of crime are estimated using data from Montana farmers and ranchers. Victimization has the strongest direct effect. Distance from police and neighbors seems to heighten sensitivity to lesser police patrol activity in isolated areas, which in turn increases concern about criminal victimization. Fear of crime in rural farm areas reflects, in part, the spatial arrangements and related consequences of living in these regions.
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