Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers Everett M

Author:Rogers, Everett M. [Rogers, Everett M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2003-08-04T14:00:00+00:00

Deutschmann and Fals Borda (1962b) then proceeded to determine the characteristics of the five adopter categories, and to compare these results with the present author’s study of Ohio farmers (Rogers, 1961). In both Saucío and in Ohio, farm size, formal education, exposure to mass media, and opinion leadership (measured as the degree to which a farmer was sought by others for information and advice about agricultural innovations) were the variables most highly related to innovativeness. That is, innovators differed most sharply from laggards on these socioeconomic and communication variables in both Saucío and Ohio. The diffusion of agricultural innovations seemed to display striking similarities in the two quite different settings. The diffusion process represented a general model of human behavior, rather than being limited to the United States and Western Europe.

However, there were certain sharp differences between the two systems of study regarding the diffusion of innovations. For example, the range in average farm size from innovators to laggards in Ohio was 339 to 128 acres (Rogers, 1961). In Saucío, the most innovative farmer had one hundred times the amount of farmland of the least innovative farmer! Such extremes in socioeconomic status are often characteristic of peasant villages in Third World nations. As in most other diffusion researches, the innovators in Saucío were much more cosmopolite than the laggards, traveling outside of the village to market towns and cities, and learning about new ideas from the mass media.

The diffusion process in Saucío was mainly via interpersonal communication channels within the village. In previous farm diffusion research in the United States, the mass media were most important at the knowledge stage in the innovation-decision process. However, in Saucío 43 percent of the sources or channels reported by farmers at the knowledge stage for innovations involved face-to-face communication with other farmers in the village. Only five farmers reported using mass media sources or channels at the knowledge stage in adopting an innovation. This heavy dependence on interpersonal communication in Saucío seemed to slow the diffusion process, especially that of the first two innovations, a process that began during the 1930s. Their S-curves had a long “tail” to the left, in which five to ten years were required before the rate of adoption took off. So word of mouth was particularly important in the diffusion process in the peasant village of Saucío.

The Ryan and Gross (1943) hybrid seed corn study found that most farmers did not adopt an innovation until they had tried it on an experimental basis on their own farm. The typical Iowa farmer adopted the new seed only after several years of trial planting. In contrast, most Saucío villagers went directly to full-scale use of the six innovations without first trying them out. Perhaps such impulsive behavior occurred because the Colombian villagers, due to their low level of formal education, did not have a “scientific” learning-from-experience attitude. Deutschmann and Fals Borda (1962b) suggested that such plunge-type decisions may have been due to the conditioning of Colombian peasants to respond immediately to authoritarian sources.

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