Adoption of innovations by foresters: a case study of forest soils information in New Hampshire

Abstract

Identifying the factors that influence foresters to adopt management innovations is essential for developing models that accurately forecast the rate at which new technology will be adopted. Models were developed to evaluate the impact of sociodemographic characteristics, attitudes, and structural–external variables on New Hampshire foresters' decisions to adopt three distinct soil information sources. The soil information sources studied were County Soil Surveys, Important Forest Soils Groups, and Leak's Habitat Classification System. Discriminant analytic models were developed and evaluated for each information source. Information on use and other variables were collected by a mail survey with a response rate of approximately 60%. The results reveal that structural variables exerted the greatest influence on adoption decisions, while sociodemographic characteristics were the least important. College and noncollege sources of information about the innovations were the most important variables in the discriminant models. Other significant structural variables included employer, prior use of soils information, and participation in continuing education. All three models correctly classified more than 75% of the respondents, with one model classifying more than 90%. The difference in accuracy may be attributed to differences in information access among the three soils information sources.