Overview data: The WWOOF questionnaires

Online questionnaires were distributed to WWOOF hosts and volunteers in an effort to obtain a general profile of both groups and so that back-to-the-landers and aspiring farmers could be identified for further analysis and future contact. This exercise was particularly useful for gathering preliminary data about potential research participants, as well as identifying some themes in the biographical sketches of WWOOF hosts and some attitudinal issues worth exploring in depth. Although the questionnaires were intended simply to provide supplementary data to immersive ethnographic fieldwork, they proved a valuable tool for obtaining a profile of host farms and gaining access to willing research participants.

Some considerable negotiation was necessary to establish the value of my research to the WWOOF organisation itself, and the questionnaires have been modelled on some principles of the ‘participatory’ approach, defined by Kesby et al. (2005: 144) as ‘…working with rather than on people; about generating data and working in ways that increase participants’ ability to bring about positive change in their own lives.’ In this respect I have endeavoured to offer participating institutional actors, such as WWOOF and Slow Food, access to anonymised research findings and assistance using in those findings to further their own interests, which I view as supportive of alternative agriculture. However, a major objective of this research is to assess how these organisations’ relationships with new farmers can be mutually beneficial, meaning that the benefits of participation in the research were not always clear from the beginning. To this end, all participating organisations have been provided with a summary report on the research, tailored to specific themes that link their interests with empirical findings.

4.2.1. The WWOOF farmer questionnaire

A questionnaire design that was mutually beneficial to my research and the WWOOF organisation took several attempts, particularly in the case of the questionnaire for farmers.

Its early drafts offered little information of value to the organisation, at least according to the WWOOF President. Accordingly the questionnaire was revised through several drafts, with input coming from the WWOOF President, myself, a relative raised in rural Italy and an Italian colleague in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. A final edition of the questionnaire, intended to provide a general sketch of backgrounds and attitudes of farmers participating in the WWOOF scheme, was posted online (at www.surveymonkey.com) in January, 2010 in both Italian and English versions. I composed an introduction to the survey, again in both languages, and the President distributed the introduction and links to the questionnaire via the WWOOF host e-mail list, to which he retained exclusive access.

The final edition of the survey (Appendices I and II) is brief and simple, and was designed to solicit general overview data about the experiences, activities and outlooks of host farms.

Furthermore, contacts for ethnographic research could be collected through an option that asked respondents whether they would invite further involvement with the project. I analysed the responses of willing participants to determine their appropriateness for this research project on criteria primarily related to their location (North v. South and general accessibility) and backgrounds (urban v. rural).

The WWOOF farmer questionnaire was distributed to 450 farms in both Italian and English versions and received 54 completed responses, a 12% response rate. The WWOOF officials and I expected a fairly low response rate on account of farmers’ often limited access to high-speed internet connections and antipathy for form-filling, a consequence of the excessive bureaucracy frequently remarked upon by farmers. Although a higher response rate would have been desirable, the results have nonetheless been useful, particularly for making further connections based on the responses. Of the survey participants, 93% invited further contact for

research purposes and several wrote to me directly to share their stories and invite me to their farms.² I performed quantitative analysis of the data, relating mostly to demographic, biographical and attitudinal themes, the results of which are spread throughout subsequent chapters and compiled in Appendices I and II. These results have been shared with the WWOOF Italia officials, and are intended as an impression of contemporary economic practices, levels of involvement in WWOOF, other network affiliations and attitudes to organic farming in Italy.

4.2.2. The WWOOF volunteer questionnaire

After casual discussions and semi-structured interviews with the WWOOF Coordinator and President in August, we jointly embarked on the creation of a second questionnaire, in this case for WWOOF volunteers. It was hoped that the survey would offer the most comprehensive overview yet of WWOOFers’ experience of farming (before and as a result of WWOOF membership), their geographical backgrounds, satisfaction with WWOOF as an organisation and the place of agriculture in their outlook for the future. The questionnaire was launched at the end of August, 2010 through the WWOOF Coordinator, who sent the appropriate web link to 2391 volunteer members. Despite a reminder e-mail being sent in late September, the responses never exceeded 91 forms, accounting for a very low response rate of 4%. This rate was both surprising and disappointing. The most likely explanations for the muted response reside in the fact that WWOOFers are by definition mobile, with internet access restricted by their frequent migration between farms. Furthermore, there is a strong possibility that members of the organisation who had finished their period of volunteering, or had yet to begin, were less likely to respond than members collaborating with host farms at the time the questionnaire was distributed. Those who are not currently participating in WWOOF have less reason to check the regular e-mail updates that come from the organisation, and would thus have been prone to missing the questionnaire link. This suggests an unfortunate double bind, with past and future as well as current WWOOFers disinclined or unable to respond for differing but valid reasons. Results of the questionnaire are again embedded throughout the text, but

2 This high percentage of interested respondents suggests a likely bias in the data. There is a strong possibility that those who completed the questionnaire were particularly inclined to respond to a call for participation in back-to-the-land research because it spoke to their own experiences. Given this fact, coupled with the low response rate, the questionnaire respondents are not generally regarded as a representative sample of WWOOF hosts as a whole; rather, this data is used selectively throughout the study to support or challenge observations that have arisen through predominantly qualitative methods.

given the weak reliability of the data, little emphasis is placed upon them. The resultant data, then, should be regarded not as a comprehensive overview of the WWOOF experience but as suggestive of certain themes that may stimulate further analysis.

Despite the limited success of the questionnaire in comprehensively providing this information, the online questionnaire is still considered by all parties to be the most logistically practical method of communicating this data between WWOOF and its volunteer members. WWOOF Italia officials were disappointed by the poor response but agree that the online questionnaire method offers the most direct means of obtaining this kind of information.