Kathy Pitts, Center for Farm Health and Safety, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA

The purpose of this presentation is to examine the challenges involved in the dissemination and adoption of a farm health and safety innovation, “Hispanic Farm Workers Interactive Plays.” By examining the successes and failures of the dissemination of this program we hope to understand why a highly successful intervention program remains unadopted after two years of generating community adoption efforts. Furthermore, we will validate a hypothesis that is likely to explain one important aspect of the program’s adoption problem. To aid us in explaining this phenomenon, we will revisit the lessons learned on this Center for Farm Health and Safety project and review the diffusion of innovation literature.
We will focus on a particular aspect of Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovation Model, heterophily/homophily, to validate our hypothesis that 1) farm health and safety researchers don’t speak the same “cultural language” as their constituent groups and that 2) this lack of a similar “cultural language” is a major obstacle to the adoption of farm safety innovations.

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