Farmer Behaviour as Reasoned Action: A Critical Review of Research with the Theory of Planned Behaviour

In many countries farmers face pressure to adopt practices to promote sustainability and resilience while ensuring efficient business management to produce food and other agricultural products at reasonable cost. Given a policy context in which voluntary action is preferred over government regulatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of agricultural economics Vol. 72; no. 2; pp. 388 - 412
Main Authors Sok, Jaap, Borges, Joao Rossi, Schmidt, Peter, Ajzen, Icek
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.06.2021
Subjects
agricultural economics
Agricultural products
Agriculture
Business administration
business management
Data analysis
Decision making
Elaboration
face
farmer behaviour
Farmers
farmers' attitudes
Government regulations
issues and policy
Methodological problems
Motivation
reasoned action approach
reflective and formative measurement
Research design
Resilience
review
structural equation and MIMIC models
Theory of planned behavior
theory of planned behaviour
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ISSN0021-857X
1477-9552
DOI10.1111/1477-9552.12408

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Summary:In many countries farmers face pressure to adopt practices to promote sustainability and resilience while ensuring efficient business management to produce food and other agricultural products at reasonable cost. Given a policy context in which voluntary action is preferred over government regulation, understanding farmers’ motivation to embrace recommended practices has become a major subject for research. Increasingly, this endeavour is guided by the theory of planned behaviour, a reasoned action approach (Fishbein and Ajzen, 2010). We provide a brief overview of the theory of planned behaviour and an elaboration of good practices in the assessment of the theory’s constructs. We systematically review 124 applications of the theory to farmer behaviour on a number of specific review criteria. Based on observations of improper use, we consider theoretical and methodological issues and provide recommendations for research design and data analysis.
Bibliography:Jaap Sok and Joao Rossi Borges are both with the Department of Social Sciences, Business Economics, Wageningen University, Netherlands. Email: jaap.sok@wur.nl for correspondence. Peter Schmidt is in the Centre for International Environmental and Development Research (ZEU), University of Gießen, Germany. Icek Ajzen is in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for the constructive comments on earlier drafts.
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ISSN:0021-857X
1477-9552
DOI:10.1111/1477-9552.12408