How stable are farmers’ risk perceptions? A follow-up study of one community in the Karoo

Two cohorts of Likert scale risk data were subjected to rigorous principal component analysis to simplify the participants’ risk rankings. This improves methodologically on the first Karoo risk analysis. More than 80% of the items and two-thirds of the participants overlap in these datasets, which made it possible to study the stability of these perceptions over the four years that elapsed between the surveys. Two-thirds of the items were factorable and the four common factors identified in the first cohort all persisted in the second cohort, which indicates stability. The four items added to the second survey created the opportunity to study how emerging structures differ when the lists change. The principal component analysis conducted on the longer list identified a new common concern about growing government control over private enterprise that came to light as a result of adding four extra items. Predation ranked as the number one risk in both surveys followed by drought. Labour and security were middling risks, market access a low risk and a lack of support from the local cooperative no risk at all.