- Questionnaire Design
- Questionnaire Administration
- Analysis of Ranked Responses
- Classification of Responses
Research Method
Questionnaire Design
Three questionnaires were designed - one for members of the SLM group, a slightly modified version for land users who were not members, and a much shorter version for the professionals who provided inputs to the SLM Group (e.g. Regional Council staff, agricultural/ horticultural consultants and supplier representatives). The questionnaires were designed to:
- test the relationship between membership of and involvement with the groups and attitudes and behaviour towards sustainable land management;
- clarify the role and value of the groups to the members and other land-users;
- identify the barriers and effective incentives to behaviour change.
The short version for professionals focused on their perceptions of barriers to and incentives for change.
Questionnaire Administration
In all but the Kurow Group, the questionnaires for members and professionals were administered at the end of each meeting with the SLM groups. Non members (some of whom had participated in SLM Group activities and others who had not) were more difficult to locate and a variety of methods were employed to get questionnaires completed by this group. These methods included:
- face-to-face interviews or phone calls to farmers whose names were supplied by SLM Group members,
- phone calls to farmers randomly selected from supplier customer lists or,
- face-to-face interviews with customers in agriculture supply shops,
- interviewing growers waiting to drive into the packing shed in Hawkes Bay (where the apple harvest was at its peak).
Where possible, the questionnaires for non-members were completed as face-to-face interviews. However time constraints in the field meant that in many cases this was not possible. Therefore other methods had to be adopted but in each case the respondent was contacted by phone for an initial discussion before the questionnaire was administered. If the respondent had a fax (and in many cases they did), the questionnaire was faxed to them to complete and return. For others the questionnaire was either posted with a return envelope or (to save time in the latter stages of the research) completed over the phone. The latter approach was the least satisfactory because of the difficulty of completing the ranking questions (12 & 13) when the respondent did not have the list of options in front of them. A copy of the questionnaires is included in Appendix E.
The research team was not able to visit Kurow due to financial constraints, but relied on telephone interviews and various papers provided by group members and the Canterbury Regional Council. In addition, members of the group, a selection of field day attendees and farmers not involved with the group were contacted by phone and asked if they would complete the questionnaire. About 10 committee members and 20 non-members were mailed or faxed the questionnaire or completed it over the phone.
In the phone interviews with group members the same basic semi-structured approach was adopted as with the other case studies to elicit why the group was set up, what it had achieved and their particular involvement in the group. They were asked to outline the physical/technical and financial issues that were being addressed by the group. Each interview finished with questions related to how the group was managed, its involvement in the wider community and the impact it appeared to be having.
All those contacted completed a questionnaire making a total of 139 responses comprising the following groupings:
| Committee members of SLM Group | 43 |
| Non-members who participated in Group activities | 39 |
| Non-members who did not participate in Group activities | 37 |
| Professionals | 20 |
| Total completed questionnaires | 139 |
Analysis of Ranked Responses
Two of the questions (on barriers to and incentives required for change) contained a list of options which respondents were asked to rank in order of importance. These responses were processed as follows. For each question, respondents were asked to rank each of the six options from 1 to 6. Respondents were asked to cross out options they considered to be irrelevant. These were given a value of 7. Respondents could give the same ranking to more than one option if they were considered to be of equal importance. The ranking number was then multiplied by the number of respondents who assigned that ranking to that particular option (e.g. if 10 people gave one option a ranking of 6th, the cumulative total for that option would be 60). The lower the cumulative total, the greater the importance accorded to it by respondents. The cumulative totals were then ranked from 1-6 (with one being the most important) and the rankings combined across case-studies to form Tables 10 and 11.
Classification of Responses
To analyse the effectiveness of the SLM groups in influencing attitudes and behaviour towards land management, it was necessary to classify the land-user respondents according to their degree of involvement in the Group. Those involved (currently or in the past) in the organisation, administration and goal setting of the Group were classed as members. In the case of the Hawkes Bay Focus Orchard these were the members of the community group, for Nelson Model Farm they were the management group, for McRaes Trust it was the members of the Trust Board, for NOSLaM it was the members of the committee which administers the various land-care groups and for Kurow they were the members of the Kurow Liaison Committee.
Non-members were divided into those who received newsletters and had some level of involvement in Group events (such as attending field days and workshops) and those who had no involvement at all.
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