by: Ronica Stromberg, NRT & EPSCoR Program Coordinator
EPSCoR doctoral student Sabrina Gulab is learning how big of risk-takers Nebraska ranchers are on technology.
She and doctoral student Holly Nesbitt led a Nebraska-Montana EPSCoR team this summer in surveying 4,500 Nebraska ranchers about landscape changes and a new technology capable of screening for such changes.
The technology, resilience informatics, shows where harmful changes in vegetation, like the spread of red cedar trees, are occurring in the United States. Ranchers and others can use the Rangeland Analysis Platform to see what may be coming their way and take action to prevent it.
Gulab took part in the survey to gauge rancher attitudes toward adopting this new technology.
“I'm interested in looking into the risk attitudes of these ranchers because when we talk about adoption, the first thing that literature talks about is the risk attitude of a person, whether he's willing to adopt a certain technology or not, because technology comes with a cost,” she said.
She is also looking at the ranchers’ social networks--who they know, how strong those ties are and what professions those connections hold. A rancher can get different kinds of information from different contacts, and a popular rancher with many varied contacts may be more willing to take risks and adopt a new technology, she said.
“A person’s decisions in a risky environment are significantly influenced by information from others he interacts with repeatedly,” she said. “Also, it is evident that people follow others’ advice and copy their decisions, which implies that the size of the social network plays a vital role in decision making and risk-taking behavior.”
Or, at least, that is what past studies in behavioral economics have suggested, Gulab said, as an agricultural economics student interested in behavioral economics.
“That's what the literature says, and that's what I'm going to find out: whatever the literature says, am I going to get similar results from my survey or not?” she said.
The EPSCoR team of 16 professors, postdocs and graduate students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Montana-Missoula are seeking such information to know better how to target the behavior of ranchers on concerns such as conserving water and reducing landscape shifts, she said.
From the 19-page survey, Gulab is examining responses to questions about whether the ranchers have noticed any vegetation changes on their land, if they have a strong and diverse social network, whether they believe themselves capable of reducing the risks of vegetation change on their land and what their attitude toward risk is.
The responses are still trickling in, but so far, the survey has achieved almost a 13 percent response rate, considered high for such a long survey.
“We got a really good response rate from the ranchers although we had a lot of questions in the survey,” Gulab said. “The unique thing that we put into the survey was asking them about their social
network, which I think it was the very first time someone has done that in Nebraska, especially for ranchers.”
Theresa Floyd, a Montana professor of management and marketing on the EPSCoR grant, agreed that the survey is particularly exciting as a study of the networks of individuals or “egos,” as referred to in behavioral science.
“As far as I know, no one has conducted an ego network survey with such a large sample of ranchers that seeks to understand how their networks influence the decisions they make about managing their land,” she said.
“We’ll be able to learn a lot about the factors that affect how ranchers manage their land to mitigate regime shifts, which is interesting theoretically, but also could provide a lot of insight for practical solutions,” Floyd said.
Gulab dropped one question about a hypothetical gambling situation because it received low responses. She had planned to use the question to measure more accurately the ranchers’ risk attitudes, but ranchers skipped over it.
“They really didn't understand that question and they didn't respond to it, which impacted my analysis,” she said.
She is now designing an experiment with university students to gauge whether people in general might be more willing to trust information they receive from people from their own community dealing with a different form of land degradation or whether they would be more apt to trust information coming from ranchers from outside their community facing similar land degradation problems.
Gulab still has much analysis to do before she can report her results in her dissertation, but she said she has learned a lot from her work on the EPSCoR team. She helped design the survey and arrange for printing and sending it, entered survey data, and instructed and supervised two undergraduates in entering the data.
“One thing I must say I have learned is, when you are designing a survey, you have to be very precise, in particular, designing the survey questions and even the structure of the survey book,” she said. “You have to be very easy with the question wordings you are writing.”
She has improved her professional skills through the EPSCoR project, she said, and her adviser, Simanti Banerjee, has noticed.
“I feel very happy when my advisor tells me to help her other graduate students because I have expertise in designing a survey and running Qualtrics,” Gulab said. “And then, also, how to clean, get good questions to design a survey.
“My advisor always tells me like, ‘Why don't you help this person because you have experience?’ So, I think if she considers me good enough to help those people, then I think I have learned a lot from this project and from this team.”