Dyadic Analysis of a Speed-Dating Format between Farmers and Citizens

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

A brief summary

Alienation between farmers and citizens and vice versa has increased amid complex developments of agriculture’s development in developed countries during the past decades. Traditional public relations’ instruments have failed to generate societal acceptance of today’s intensive agricultural practices.

Other controversial contexts showed that open face-to-face encounters at eye level hold the potential to promote mutual understanding and acceptance. Thus the study aims to analyze how speed-dating conversations between farmers and citizens considering participants’ characteristics impact on different outcome variables. 24 farmers and 22 citizens specifically recruited for participation in the speed-dating were organized to have short conversations of 10-15 minutes in different farmer-citizen-constellations. Each conversation had a specific overall agricultural topic including animal welfare, agricultural technology, environmental protection, agricultural policy and esteem for food. Four months after, different outcomes were measured in a follow-up survey. For 84 person-constellations complete dyadic data were available to be analyzed by hierarchical regression analyses.

Results show that the communication dynamics between citizens and farmers are very complex. Regarding the number of statements used by farmers in the conversation it is advisible that farmers should keep a stronger balance between personal and factual statements meaning that they should reduce the number of factual statements and put more attention to ethical values and emotional topics.

Constellations with male citizens, female farmers, more educated farmers, extroverted participants, emotionally stable farmers and more open participants tended to have higher dyadic outcome variable values. The results call for a re-design of farmer-citizen dialogue formats to facilitate more direct interpersonal communication.

General comments

The main contribution of this paper is the approach to test speed dating as a form of communicative tool to raise acceptance for modern agriculture. This is a challenge that needs to be met by the whole society and I thus very relevant in the ongoing public debate about the acceptance of agriculture.

The paper may help to further develop successful dialogues and communication strategies to bring together the views of farmers and citizens which is highly relevant if the transformation of agriculture shall be successful. However, there is still a lot to do for research and practice in this field. First suggestions are made by the authors and should be extended in future work. One issue that would be interesting o address would be the analysis of the different topics discussed in the speed dating from a more content oriented point of view. For example: How differ the conservations concerning the discussed topics?

The manuscript is clearly structured and cities appropriate literature. Th approach is well chosen and described, limitations are discussed and possible extensions and improvements are made clear.

Specific comments

Line 44: harsh critique is not only focussing on social media; please add other formats

Line 196: are there previous works that had a similar approach? Please clarify and add if necessary

Line 300: satisfied with the dialogue format; please comment on how realistic such situations may be(come) in daily life

Line 368ff: is this more a limitation than a part of the discussion? Please check and maybe rethink

Line 420ff: would it make sense to also have speed dating including actors of entire value chains that would then represent not only the extreme ends of the value chain (farmers and citizens) but also processors and traders?

Minor comments

Line 26: ,

Line 183 Table 4 misses title

Line 586 delete open tracking change

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thanks for your valuable feedback. We respond to your and the other reviewers' comments in the attached word file in the track-change-modus.

Regards

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The first part of the paper has an ambitious gol which is to design a new way of dialogue between farmers and citizen. A good intuition  that goes to a new dialogue that can be seen as a starting poit of a new concept of coproduction between farmers and consumers/citizen. Within this new concept future farmers choice related to the practices can be done in line with the sociaty needs. At the same time the consumption styles can be redefined. However the discussion of the results is limited. The results could have been exploded better. I cannot express a negative opinion but the results could have been more ambitious. In general the structure of the paper and the model used are good and well described

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thanks for your valuable feedback. We respond to your and the other reviewers' comments in the attached word file in the track-change-modus.

Regards

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This manuscript provides much needed attention to assessing ways to facilitate effective engagement between an industry sector, in this case agriculture, and affected stakeholders.  It is a worthwhile contribution in presenting a systematic analysis – from formulation of an ‘intervention’ to a long-term follow up to see what impressions it left.  The intervention aligns with notions of dialogue, which has been increasingly touted in fields of science communication, community engagement and impact assessment.  The focus on outcomes of conversations – interchanges during the speed-dating intervention – is valuable as an of research on the micro-level of face-to-face communication as it bears on larger societal issues.  

It is a well-constructed piece, clearly laid out and well written.  The methods are explained clearly, and tables of results of the survey data are presented for the curious.  Analysis of statistics is not my strength, but I can readily comment on other aspects of the piece – as it does fall in my long-term area of interest.  I have provided extensive comments on the PDF provided for review, with my comments oriented to help strengthen the argument. 

The literature review in the opening section usefully cites a range of pieces.  However, often a conclusion seems to be drawn after citing just one study.  It might be more accurate to make these conclusions a bit more equivocal.  I have noted examples in my comments on the manuscript.  That conclusiveness could just be a stylistic choice or an artefact of training in social psychology – not my field but that tends to have a more positivist bent than I am comfortable with.  

The piece could use more explanation up front on the history and cultural tendencies in Germany related to concern in society about technology, such as that used in agriculture.  Also, it needs a bit of history on the developments in agriculture in Germany over the past few decades.  One wants the piece to have the ring of truth, a sense of veracity, for the arguments to have greater credibility with agricultural researchers or policymakers.  

The speed dating experiment and follow up survey and analysis are a great contribution to research in this area.  That makes this manuscript well worth publishing.  It illustrates that it is not impossible to assess potential outcomes from conversations.  More needs to be made of this methodological contribution.  That is, the conclusions about how to run dialogue between farmers and others seem less compelling than conclusions that can be drawn about how to study dialogue and conversations on these sorts of issues.  After all, only 20 farmers and 20 counterparts were involved; so, results can only be suggestive, not definitive.  That said, even suggestive results are worth sharing.  

The arguments offered – about agriculture and views of it by others – could usefully be enriched by citing in more depth a couple of qualitative studies.  I realise that a wide array of studies are indeed cited, but they seem to be referred to in a single sentence.  A bit more discussion of a couple of the most relevant cases would be worthwhile.  That helps to triangulate this survey data with data from other sources, and it sets a nice precedent for both qualitative and quantitative researchers to draw more on each other’s work.  

Again, a nice piece of research, well written and well worth publishing in this journal.  I would recommend minor revisions aligned with my comments here and on the manuscript - which has been uploaded.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thanks for your valuable feedback. We respond to your and the other reviewers' comments in the attached word file in the track-change-modus.

Regards

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx