innovation, the two rural sociologists also asked each respondent al formal education, age, farm size, income, frequency of travel to Des Moines and other cities, readership of farm magazines, and other variables th were later correlated with innovativeness (measured as the year in which each farmer decided to adopt hybrid corn Neal Gross.
Neal Gross was from an urban background in Milwaukee, Wiscrindin and initially felt somewhat uncomfortable interviewing lowa farmers Someone in Ames told Gross that farm people got up very early in the morning, so on his first day of data gathering, he arrived at a respondent's home at 6:00 A while it was still half dark. By the end of this first day Gross had interviewed twenty-one people, and he averaged an incredible fourteen interviews per day for the entire study! Today, a survey interviewer who averages four interviews per day is considered hardworking During ne personal interview, an Iowa farmer, perhaps slyly leading him on, asked Gross for advice about controlling horse nettles. Gross had never heard of horse nettles. He told the farmer that he should call a veterinarian to look at his sick horse (horse nettles are actually a kind of noxious weed) Neal Gross personally interviewed 345 farmers in the two lowa commu nities, but twelve farmers operating less than twenty acres were discarded from the data analysis, as were 74 respondents who had started farming after hybrid corn began to diffuse. Thus, the data analysis was based.
respondents When all of the data were gathered, Ryan and Gross coded the farmers responses into numbers The diffusion researchers analyzed the nterview a desk calculator (computers were m data by hand tabulation and w available for data analysis until some years later). Within a year, Gross diffusion of hybrid com ed his (1949) comp aster's thesis shortly thereafter Ryan and Gross (1913) published their reseavch findings in the journal Rural Sociology (this article is the most widely cited publica tion from the study, although there are several others) This paper became the founding document for the research specialty of the diffusion of innova tions. Several previous studies had been completed on the diffusion of agr cultural innovations, but they did not lead to a research tradition because they did not create a research paradigm for the diffusion of innovations (Valente and Rogers, 1995). The Ryan and Cross (913) study established the customary research methodology to be used by most diffusion investiga- tors: retrospective survey interviews in which adopters of an innovation are asked when they adopted, where or from whom they obtained information about the innovation, and the consequences of adoption, Ryan and Gross (1943) popularized the term "diffusion" (which had previonsly been used