Psychological Constructs Underlying Farmers’ Decisions to Diversify or Specialise their Businesses – An Application of Theory of Planned Behaviour

Abstract

We use the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to explain how underlying psychological constructs influence farmers' decisions to extend their farm businesses to income-generating ventures outside conventional agricultural production. The analysis contrasts the influence of psychological constructs on this decision with those on decisions to specialise in a single farm enterprise or to have multiple farm enterprises. This is one of the first studies to introduce psychological constructs into the study of farm diversification. It is based on a sample of 929 Swedish farms participating in the official Swedish Farm Economic Survey. These data are supplemented with a detailed postal questionnaire to the participating farmers, generating a response rate of 73% and an effective sample size of 679 farmers and their businesses. Data are analysed with factor and multinomial logistic regression analyses. Results show that psychological constructs in TPB (attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control) influence farmers' decisions regarding the strategy they adopt. Attitude and subjective norm are found to be especially influential in these decisions. Given the prominent role agriculture still has in rural development policy, where the development of new ventures in farm businesses is perceived as the engine for rural economic growth and employment, these findings have clear policy implications.

Farmers’ self-perception toward agricultural technology adoption: evidence on adoption of submergence-tolerant rice in Eastern India

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“…For this study, we have adopted the ten statements used in the study conducted by Hansson et al (2012) with slight modifications to capture latent constructs on the three psychological constructs consisting of TPB: attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control (Fig. 1).…”

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