INNOVATION AND FARM DEVELOPMENT A MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL.

For more than a generation a considerable amount of attention has been given to the development and utilization of an empirical measure of the theoretical concept of innovativeness. Research workers in agriculture have employed various types of adoption of farm practices scales as a measure of the relative rates of adoption of technological innovations by farmers. The major problem in using an adoption scale has rested with unidimensionality; the degree to which the developed scale measures the innovativeness dimension. Following the review of several research studies aimed at establishing unidimensionality, some sociologists claimed that the analyses provided no clear cut answer as to whether adoption scales measure only a single general dimension; innovativeness. The major aims of this paper are to demonstrate that such unidimensionality does clearly exist and to show the theoretical and practical implications. The data used in this paper were drawn from an interdisciplinary study of the factors determining the adoption of agricultural innovations by a sample of 116 woolgrowers in New South Wales.