Understanding farmers' attitudes to land degradation: Some methodological considerations

Abstract

AbstractThe attitudes of farmers in the New England region of Australia are internally consistent in some cases, but in others seem inconsistent. Cluster analysis and discriminant analysis indicate that even internally inconsistent respondents can be divided into definable categories, and differences in response patterns relate significantly to other variables such as business structure, commodities being produced, attitudes to external influences in decision‐making and to conservation generally. The results suggest that for policy‐oriented research on attitudes to complex environmental issues, analysis should take account of data which do not necessarily conform to the requirements for unidimensional scale construction, but which can usefully be interpreted by analysing respondent clusters.