A Cross-Cultural Look at the Relationship between Age and Innovative Behavior

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship of age to innovativeness when the effects of opportunity have been controlled. Data were obtained from the Basic Village Education Project. The analysis was conducted on two groups of farmers, the Spanish-speaking Ladino population found in Eastern Guatemala and the Quiche-speaking Mayan population found in the mountains of Western Guatemala. Each group was subdivided into young, middle age and old categories. Innovativeness was defined as the level of agricultural technology utilized by individual farmers at the end of the BVE-project period. A separate analysis was conducted for each culture and findings for both indicate that younger farmers were more likely than their older counterparts to adopt new agricultural practices when economic opportunity is controlled. These findings are of three fold importance: they indicate the importance of economic constraints to innovation; they contain implications for policies concerning target development programs, and they contain a warning about ethnocentric hypotheses in research related to “underdeveloped” countries.