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The purpose of this chapter is to present the research questions, objectives and methodology, including a preliminary model that will inform the subsequent development of the methodology. This builds upon the literature review presented in Chapter 4 and empirical evidence from previous behavioural studies in agriculture. These will provide the theoretical grounding to understanding the behaviour of the farmer towards FPRM tools. In particular, the use of TRA, TPB, Diffusion of Innovations and the DTPB is validated as a basis to create the behavioural model applicable to the objectives and questions appropriate and relevant to this research.

5.2 Research questions and preliminary model

5.2.1 Research questions

Despite the continued volatility of the wheat price in England, between and within an individual marketing season, farmers in England mostly continue to market their wheat using the traditional methods of spot, forward and pools contracts (DEFRA and HGCA, 2009), as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.

The research addresses the following question:

• What are the determinants of behaviour that give rise to the adoption, or not, of FPRM within England’s arable farmers’ portfolio of selling techniques? This question was the primary focus of research and this thesis concentrated on gathering, extracting and making conclusions about the adoption behaviour of farmers towards the use of FPRM.!

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5.2.2 Research objectives

To answer the above questions a set of objectives was derived:

• With reference to England’s wheat growing farmers, to investigate the determinants of using FPRM tools, (futures, options and their OTC variants), when marketing their wheat crop.

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• Based on these determinants, to create an adoption model of FPRM in England’s wheat market.

• Advance the knowledge of England’s wheat growing arable farmers and the broader agricultural sector of FPRM methods by defining those farmers most likely to adopt FPRM tools.

5.2.3 The preliminary research model

The framework for this study is based on the DTPB model (Taylor and Todd, 1995a) and adapted from research by Jackson et al. (2006); (2008); Jackson (2008); Jackson et al. (2009). The justification for using the DTPB is that it provides a more detailed description of the behavioural constructs than the TRA and TPB. In addition, the inclusion of factors external to the constructs of the DTPB, such as age and gender, are included for their potential to further explain the behaviour of farmers.

These external factors can be separated into factors that are the same for all farmers, such as price volatility, and those that are specific to an individual farmer. The universal factors are discussed in Chapter 2 but are not under investigation in the remainder of this thesis. Moreover, it is the effects of factors specific to an individual farmer that are of key importance in understanding behaviour. Such factors that would influence the use of FPRM tools are:

• Farm factors: size, diversification, importance of a crop to overall farm viability. • Social structure factors: age, farm size, education, income.

• Channels of communication factors: printed media, radio/TV/internet.

• External farm advice: dedicated farm advisor, membership of farming and community organisations, use of independent marketing advisors, use of a wheat broker, use of academic literature.

Following on from the behavioural constructs of Att, SN and PBC in the TPB, the DTPB separates each of these constructs into sub-constructs. The Att construct was decomposed based on Rogers’ Diffusion theory resulting in the five sub-constructs of innovation; relative advantage; compatibility; complexity; ease of use (trialability, observability); and, risk. In

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decomposing the SN construct, the sub-constructs of peers and superiors proposed by Taylor and Todd (1995) were replaced with peers, merchants, independent advisors, press and academia as these were thought to be more relevant to the behaviour being studied. Similarly, the decomposed PBC proposed by Taylor and Todd (1995) was replaced by more relevant sub-constructs of training, information and support. This approach will be adapted in Chapter 6.

5.3 Research methodology and design

5.3.1 Introduction

In the previous section, the research questions and objectives were presented. This section describes the methodology used in answering them. A mixed-method approach (Teddlie and Tashakkori, 2003) was adopted as it combines both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The former explains basic exploratory questions, while the latter method answers confirmatory questions. This methodology resulted in conducting one-to-one in- depth interviews, focus groups and an England-wide farmer questionnaire. The methodology draws upon methodologies presented in numerous works describing qualitative and quantitative research methods (Kish, 1965; Krueger, 1994; Yin, 1994; Alreck and Settle, 1995; Gladwin, 1997; Creswell, 1998; Berg, 2001; Bryman, 2001; Mason, 2002; Sekaran, 2003; Saunders et al., 2009). The statistical analysis techniques are well expressed by Tabachnick and Fidell (2007); Mazzocchi (2008); Field (2009); Pallant (2010).

5.3.2 Research methodology

The first objective of this research is to define the behavioural determinants of the use of FPRM by farmers in England in marketing wheat. A behavioural model was developed based on the literature but also on real-life attitudes and opinions from actual wheat farmers in England. This was achieved by individual in-depth one-to-one farmer interviews and focus groups concerning current wheat-marketing methods and tools and risk management strategies and subsequently by a national survey of arable farmers in all key wheat growing regions of England. The resulting model was then tested on wheat farmers in England to see if it does, indeed, fully encompass and mirror the current context in England.

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Morris and Potter (1995) suggest behavioural research should focus on the decision-making processes of individual farmers, their motives, values and attitudes. In fact, behavioural research is a largely questionnaire based methodology but ‘actor-orientated’ and that continue that the ‘behaviour approach’ refers to broad range of studies that employ actor- orientated quantitative methodologies to the investigation of decision-making and that behaviour research also covers a variety of disciplines, including economics and sociology (Burton and Rob, 2004). Morris and Potter (1995) classified behaviour studies as those which:

• seek to understand the behaviour of individual decision-makers;

• focus on psychological constructs such as attitudes, values and goals but also commonly gather additional relevant data on farm structure, economic situation, successional status etc. and,

• employ largely qualitative methodologies for investigating psychological constructs.

Saunders et al. (2009) suggest research also draws upon the concepts of ‘positivism’ and ‘interpretivism’. Positivism reflects working with an observable social reality and produces law-like generalisations similar to those produced by physical and natural scientists (Saunders et al., 2009). Positivist characteristics can be used from data originally collected from in-depth interviews. This research used existing theories to develop hypotheses, which were tested and confirmed and only observable phenomena were used to lead to credible data to build on. A highly structured methodology was used in order to allow for replication. Statistical analysis lead from the quantifiable data (Saunders et al., 2009). Interpretivism states that rich insights are lost if the social side of business is based totally on law-like generalisations. It is therefore a necessity to recognise the differences between humans in the way they react to outside influences and the greater social environment (Saunders et al., 2009).

A mixed-method approach in a single study, i.e. the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, is often used in agricultural research (Beedell and Rehman, 1999; Bailey et al., 2005; McEachern and Warnaby, 2005). Krueger (1994) suggested that there are benefits of combining qualitative and quantitative procedures, resulting in greater methodological

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mixes that strengthen the research design. This approach results in three phases to the research process shown in Figure 5.1. The first of these phases was a literature review and a qualitative approach to the development of the research questions and objectives, followed by one to one interviews and focus groups. The second phase implemented the findings of the first in the development of a behavioural model, which was tested using a national survey. The final phase concerned the analyses of the data and the formation of conclusions and recommendations.

Source: Adapted from Jackson (2008)

Figure 5.1. Phases of the research process. Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3