REECAP 7th Annual Meeting

A narrative perspective on farmer identities

Not scheduled

20m

German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig

Using behavioral insights or economic psychology to improve food, agricultural, and agri-environmental policies Session Block

Speaker

Adrian Rothers (Leibniz Universität Hannover)

Description

Identities receive considerable research attention as an explanatory factor for farmers’ willingness to engage in agri-environmental practices or schemes, and as a lever to increase this willingness. To date, research has mostly focused on identifying a small set of identities, such as productivists or conservationists. These identities are mostly descriptive snapshots of how farmers see themselves and leave many questions open: How do they develop? What are core beliefs and experiences? How do different identities “feel”? In this project, we propose a narrative perspective on farmer identities as a first step to answer these questions and to fully realize the potential of an identity perspective for agrienvironmental policy.

Research on narrative identity is concerned with the stories that people tell about (aspects of or events in) their lives. Two premises are important. First, identity narratives are individuals’ subjective constructions rather than objective reality: The same sequence of events can be told as very different stories. Second, the stories that people tell themselves are assumed to have causal impact on their experiences and behavior in new situations.

We are currently planning a survey with farmers in seven European countries. We aim for a sample size of N = 450. However, data will be collected between March and July, so it is currently unclear how much data we will have collected and analyzed by then. In this survey, we will study farmers’ narrative identities in terms of how they see themselves and which factors and experiences have shaped who they are as farmers. The resulting text data will be coded in terms of recurring stories and psychological properties. Stories are coded bottom-up and consist of plots that link specific actors and events in a coherent way. Psychological properties are coded quantitatively based on established manuals and include aspects like the affective quality of a narrative identity, its affective trajectory, or the manifestation of agency in a farmer’s narrative.

Lastly, the coded features of farmers’ narrative identities will be used for an in-depth description and comparison with farmer identities portrayed in previous research, including productivists, conservationists, innovators, traditionalists, diversifier, and pragmatists, which we measure more conventionally with closed-ended survey items. In the future, we hope to expand on this perspective to zoom in on the mechanisms linking farmer identity and agrienvironmental practices and, where appropriate, to re-narrate farmer identities in a way that reduces barriers to their adoption.