Farmers ’ Farmland Property Cognitive: Theory Building And Empirical Research

As the improvement of farmland system in China, farmers’ cognitions of farmland property rights change with the external conditions. As the direct participants, farmers’ cognitions and demands are sure to have impact on the institutional efficiency, but they did not get the due consideration during every single land property rights reform ever since the nation was founded. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the facts of the cognitions that farmers hold and the distribution of their feature, for that we can innovate and enrich farmland property rights system based on farmers themselves’ rational cognitions.In this research we studied in the Hexi Corridor. Based on farmers’ cognitions of the concept farmland property rights, through the field investigation, using SPSS and SEM(AMOS), we built a theoretical system of famers’ cognitions of farmland property rights and created a scale which have passed the reliability and validity test. Through this confirmatory factor analysis, we created a measurement model of farmland property rights cognitions, so that we could calculate famers’ cognitions level; after this measurement, we used the independent t-test to picture the intergenerational differences on the four dimensions of farmers’ farmland property rights cognitions, and analyzed the spatial differences of farmland property rights cognitions among 15 counties in the study area with the combination of GIS and Geoda; At the end, based on the descriptions and measurement of the farmland property rights cognitions, we used multiterm orderly logistic regression model to screen the main influential factors of the farmland property rights cognitions.Through research, this paper draws following conclusions:⑴ Farmers’ farmland property rights is a multi-dimension and multi-level concept system that starts from farmers’ self feelings and wills, on the side of agricultural land subject, function, behavior and the subjective value of the psychological tendency, including the basis of behavioral evaluation and selection decisions on farmers’ property cognitive.⑵ The cognitions scale’s total reliability is 0.812>0.7, and also every dimension’s reliability is above 0.7, which means the scale has a high inner agreement; the KMO is 0.785>0.7, and P value in Bartlett Test of Sphericity is 0.000<0.05, which means there is a tight correlation among each item; the average variance and the factor loading of every dimensions is above 0.5, which means latent variables is well explain their target variables and model has high inner quality and ideal dicriminant validity; through the first and second order confirmatory factor analysis, latent variables’ factor loadings are all above 0.5 the critical value, between 0.5 and 0.96, and pass the 5% significance test, which means the model has a good convergent validity.⑶ According to the 1097 questionaires, farmers’ farmland property rights cognitions level is mainly between 3.0 and 3.5, with a quantity of 351, take a percentage 32.04% of all. Sample level distributing between 1.5 to 2.0 and 4.5-5.0 takes 4.94% and 0.86%, with a quantity of 63. Farmer’s average cognitions level is 3.37. Through a further analysis, far Subject cognitions is mainly between 3.0-3.5, with a quantity of 369, takes 33.61% of all and the average is 3.08; functional cognition level is mainly between 3.5-4.0, with a quantity of 348, takes 31.76% of all and the average is 3.46; constructional cognition level is mainly between 3.0-3.5, with a quantity of 373, takes 34.04% of all and the average is 3.01; value cognition level is mainly between 3.5-4.0, with a quantity of 340, takes 31.02% of all and the average is 3.68.⑷ There are a significant intergenerational differences of cognitions level between the 1950 s, 1960 s and the 1980 s, 1990 s upon the Subject cognitions and construction cognitions, mainly about the farmland ownership, the attitude to household farmland disposition and the mortgage of the farmland, while it’s not quite different upon the cognitions of property rights function and value; the cognitions spatial self-correlation totality Moran I value is 0.386, statistically significance below 0.05, rejecting the null hypothesis, which means farmers’ cognitions level has a significant spatial positive correlation, it appears the spatial agglomeration state, among them, the county H-H and L- L area less than 50% of the research unit, among the county overall cognitive performance of spatial heterogeneity.⑸ Farmers’ property rights cognitions are significantly influenced by the individual factors as age and education degree, the household feature as the household type and the existence that some of the families are officials in the village, outer condition factors as the village position, the quantity of the enterprises, the involvement of cooperative organizations and active land rights law propagandas.