Toward a Behavioral Model of Multiple-Job-Holding Farm Families

This paper applies a multidimensional method and a structural approach to the results of research based on a field survey on the origins of pluriactivity and on the attitudes of farm families toward multiple job-holding and full-time farming. Multiple correspondence analysis makes it possible to consider jointly, from a static and dynamic point of view, several quantitative and qualitative variables concerning the family, the farm, and the socio-economic context. A typology of seven groups of farm families is established by means of cluster analysis. The typology shows that the dichotomy between pluriactive and full-time farms does not account for all of reality: a great deal of diversity exists within both groups. The major factors which explain pluriactivity and condition its performance are identified and interpreted. The implications, in term of agricultural, socio-economic and environmental policy, of the evolution of the family farms of each type are then described and analyzed. The essay concludes that future research on pluriactivity ought to pay more attention to the dynamic variables originating both within the farm families and in the socio-economic context