Truth-telling insights from farmers self-reporting surveys

Having reliable information on the conservation practices of farmers is crucial to understanding the reasons why farmers do, or do not, adopt conservation practices, and for developing policy measures intended to improve the sustainability of agriculture.

The primary source of data on farmers’ conservation practices is their self-reporting of their behaviour in surveys. This is because direct, continuous observation of farmers’ actual practices on any scale is impractical. Therefore, knowing the extent to which farmers overstate the frequency with which they engage in desirable practices from a conservation perspective (and understate the frequency with which they engage in undesirable practices) is important.

The potential for bias in survey responses has long been recognised, and a variety of questioning techniques have been developed to address this issue. This bias arises when people are motivated to answer direct questions about their opinions or behaviour falsely to avoid revealing opinions, or behaviours, they believe others (whose opinions they value) will find objectionable. If people feel that certain behaviours are strongly socially desirable (or undesirable), then securing reliable self-reported data on those behaviours using direct questioning becomes problematic.

We tried to quantify the influence of social desirability bias on farmers’ self-reporting of their conservation practices in anonymous surveys by using crosswise questioning, which is designed to overcome social desirability bias. To the best of our knowledge this is the first-ever application of the technique to sustainable farming and the conservation practices of farmers. The technique has been applied in a range of fields, including racism, charitable behaviours, health behaviours, tax evasion, and behaviours relevant to conservation and sustainability, such as illegal wildlife hunting.

We found that the influence of social desirability bias on farmers’ answers to questions about farm-related environmental practices was limited. This indicates that direct questioning provides reasonably reliable estimates of the prevalence of conservation-related farm practices. Consequently, self-reporting of conservation behaviour by farmers can be relied on when evaluating policies intended to promote sustainable development. We also found that farmers under-reported some off-farm conservation behaviours, such as signing petitions in support of the environment, when questioned directly. This raises the possibility that some farmers might privately regard these kinds of off-farm behaviours as desirable, but because they believe their peers regard these behaviours as socially undesirable they are less likely to admit to this kind of behaviour when questioned directly.