Adopter Categories and Innovativeness: Understanding the Process of New Idea Adoption - Pr, Study notes of Agricultural engineering

Download Adopter Categories and Innovativeness: Understanding the Process of New Idea Adoption - Pr and more Study notes Agricultural engineering in PDF only on Docsity! Innovativeness and Adopter Or ie{e) ua  Innovativeness • The degree to which an individual or other unit of adoption is relatively earlier in adopting new ideas than other members of the social system • Not everyone adopts at the same time • People can be classified by their adoption habits • 25-30 opportunities for adoption needed to classify someone into an adopter category Innovator • Underconforms to social system norms • Very cosmopolitan, has outside interests • Possesses some opinion leadership • Highest social status • Makes friends with other innovators • Uses impersonal sources of information Innovator • Has closest contact with source of information • Considers distances no barrier to solving problems • Better educated • Observant • Can obtain sizable financing or support Early Adopter • Respected • Next 13.5% to adopt • Progressive • Model followed by others • Greatest opinion leadership • Realizes need to maintain peers' respect Early Majority • Many informal contacts in community • Contact with early adopters • Contact with change agents • Some opinion leadership • Rarely holds formal leadership positions • Sources of information are magazines, friends, neighbors Early Majority • Relatively long adoption period • Follows with deliberate willingness • Predictable Late Majority • Skeptical • Next 34% to adopt • Questions new ideas • About average social status • Small income • Slightly below-average operation Laggard • Traditional • Last 16% to adopt • Most localite • Smallest operations • Oldest • Very little opinion leadership Laggard • Low level of education • Few organizational memberships, except church • Sources of information include: neighbors, friends, relatives • Cannot handle mental abstractions • Suspicious of the innovation, innovators, change agents Laggard • Adoption lags far behind awareness • Has social contact with other laggards • Lowest social status • Oriented to the past • Fearful of debt