Measuring Traditional Agro-Ecological Knowledge: An Example from Peasants in the Peruvian Andes

A way of operationalizing the concept of traditional agro-environmental knowledge is presented using a combination of data gathering and analysis techniques. The cultural consensus model, along with more traditional Guttman and Likert-type scaling techniques were employed to collect data on the ideas that a group of randomly sampled Andean peasant householders had regarding the best way to use their natural resources. The traditional versus nontraditional dimensionality of these shared environmental understandings was then tested against data explicitly collected to measure householders’ traditionalness.