Farmers' attitudes, objectives, behaviors, and personality traits: The Edinburgh Study of Decision Making on Farms

The Edinburgh Study of Decision Making on Farms comprises a multidisciplinary group of researchers including psychologists, agricultural scientists, business management specialists, and mathematicians. The aim of the study is to construct multivariate models of important farming behaviors, such as environmentally oriented farming, production behavior, and stress. Although many variables to be included in the models, such as personality, cognitive ability, and coping skills, could be assessed using currently available instruments, there were no readily available measures relevant to farming. Therefore, the present report describes the domains of farmers' attitudes, goals, and behaviors, and provides scales for their measurement. In addition to providing taxonomies of important areas of farmers' vocational behaviors, the report describes the correlations of farmers' attitudes, goals, and behaviors with measures of personality traits, (C) 1999 Academic Press.