Explaining the Conversion to Organic Farming of Farmers of the Obwalden Canton, Switzerland - Extension of the Theory of Planned Behavior within a Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Aysel Tutkun, Bernard Lehmann and Peter Schmidt

No 25313, 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Farmers' decisions about conversion to organic farming are analyzed with a structural equation model. The Theory of Planned Behavior (ToPB), one of the prominent theories in the social psychology, is used as the theoretical basis of this study. Though ToPB is a well-defined theory, it is static rather than procedural and cannot model the individual decision-making as a process. Therefore, we first examine the general applicability of ToPB in an agricultural context and explain the variance in intentions of farmers to convert to organic farming. Second, we extend the ToPB to make it more procedural. For this purpose, research findings from the Diffusion Theory are included as part of the behavioral model. The empirical results indicate that, overall, the model has an acceptable fit to the data. The effects of the additional variables "Goal" and "Communication" are highly significant. This illustrates the importance of forming personal goals in the behavior domain and that people act in a goal-directed, rational way. Moreover, it gives empirical evidence that communication through personal channels has a great impact on individual decision-making. Altogether, this study shows that the extended ToPB provides an appropriate approach to investigate individual decision-making processes in agriculture.

Keywords: Farm; Management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14
Date: 2006
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/25313/files/cp061088.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae06:25313

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.25313

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().