Adopter segmentation of Kedah Malays on environmental issues and diffusion of innovations

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to segment Kedah Malays into adopter groups on environmental issues based on their personality characteristics and to compare the groups across various dependent variables related to environmental issues. The results were obtained from 550 surveys of personal interviews conducted in Kedah, Malaysia in August of 2000. The adopter categories used in this study were adapted from Roger's (1995) "diffusion of innovation" model. The adopter groups for the study were (1) innovators, (2) early adopters, (3) majority, and (4) laggards. Respondents were placed into adopter groups based on how they responded to a question that required them to take an action on a hypothetical environmental issue. The four responses to the question represented the four adopter groups and were based on Rogers (1995) adopter group characteristics. The adopter groups were discriminated by five personality and two socioeconomic variables using discriminant function analysis. The discriminant function analysis revealed that the seven predictor variables accounted for 71% of the absolute variance in the discrimination of the adopter groups. The personality variables dogmatism and fatalism explained most of the variance in discriminant function I, which accounted for 81 % of the total variability. The discriminant model correctly classified 91 % of the originally grouped cases. Earlier adopters placed higher importance on environmental issues than later adopters on the study hypotheses. The results of this study demonstrate the ability to segment people into discrete audience segments based on their personality related to environmental tendencies. This ability has implications on environmental communications strategies to the various publics in Malaysia. In addition, these results have implications on the management of National Parks and amenity forests in Malaysia as it relates to environmental interpretation as a management tool. Lastly, understanding audience adopter characteristics will enhance the effectiveness of environmental campaigns in Malaysia.