Climate change typologies and audience segmentation among Corn Belt farmers

Development of natural resource user typologies has been viewed as a potentially effective means of improving the effectiveness of natural resource management engagement strategies. Prior research on Corn Belt farmers’ perspectives on climate change employed a latent class analysis (LCA) that created a six-class typology—the Concerned, Uneasy, Uncertain, Unconcerned, Confident, and Detached—to develop a better understanding of farmer perspectives on climate change and inform more effective climate adaptation and mitigation outreach strategies. The LCA employed 34 variables that are generally unobservable—beliefs about climate change, experience with extreme weather, perceived risks of climate change, and attitudes toward climate action—to identify types. The research reported in this paper builds on this typology of Corn Belt farmers by exploring 33 measures of observable farm enterprise characteristics, land management practices, and farmer demographics to assess whether variations in these observable characteristics between the six farmer classes display systematic patterns that might be sufficiently distinctive to guide audience segmentation strategies. While analyses detected some statistically significant differences, there were few systematic, meaningful observable patterns of difference between groups of farmers with differing perspectives on climate change. In other words, farmers who believe that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, that it poses risks to agriculture, and that adaptive action should be taken, may look very much like farmers who deny the existence of climate change and do not support action. The overall implication of this finding is that climate change engagement efforts by Extension and other agricultural advisors should use caution when looking to observable characteristics to facilitate audience segmentation. Additional analyses indicated that the farmer types that tended to be more concerned about climate change and supportive of adaptive action (e.g., Concerned and Uneasy) reported that they were more influenced by key private and public sector actors in agricultural social networks. On the other hand, farmers who were not concerned about climate change or supportive of adaptation (e.g., the Unconcerned, Confident, and Detached groups, comprising between one-third and one-half of respondents) were less integrated into agricultural networks. This suggests that Extension and other agricultural advisors should expand outreach efforts to farmers who are not already within their spheres of influence.This article is published as Arbuckle, J.G., J.C. Tyndall, L.W. Morton, and J. Hobbs. 2017. Climate change typologies and audience segmentation among Corn Belt farmers. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 72(3):205-214. doi:10.2489/jswc.72.3.205. Posted with permission.</p

The associations between seventh grade Finnish students’ motivational climate, perceived competence, self-determined motivation, and fundamental movement skills

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationships between motivational climate, perceived competence, self-determined motivation towards physical education (PE) and the fundamental movement skills of Finnish secondary school students. A sample of 370 seventh-grade PE students (girls n = 189; boys n = 181; mean age = 13.08; SD = 0.25) completed measures pertaining to motivational climates, perceived competence, regulation of motivation, and fundamental movement skills. Path analysis revealed results generally consistent with the theoretical tenets of the self-determination and the achievement goal theories by demonstrating that a task-involving motivational climate influenced perceived competence, which in turn affected more self-determined motivation towards PE. Furthermore, results revealed that this motivational sequence was associated with increased balance skill. A sequence consisting of task-involving climate, intrinsically regulated motivation, and balance skills was also observed. Additionally, the results indicated that task-involving motivational climate influenced perceived competence, in turn influencing manipulative and locomotor skills. Finally, an ego-involving climate was found to be a marginally positive predictor of manipulative skills

The impact of strategic entrepreneurship inside the organization : examining job stress and employee retention

How do managers and staff react to strategic entrepreneurship? How can we minimize resulting job stress and maximize employee retention? We surveyed 1,975 managers and staff in 110 departments of a diversified healthcare organization on department-level entrepreneurial orientation (EO) (e.g., risk taking, proactiveness, and innovativeness), degree of role ambiguity in their job, and their strength of intention to quit. After validating manager and staff reports of EO, we estimated structural equation models for managers and staff. Our results demonstrate that strategic entrepreneurship can impact management and staff differently and thus requires a correspondingly customized design philosophy