Personality traits, nutritional knowledge, and social capital as determinants of livelihood diversification under disaster risk: Evidence from livestock households in rural Indonesia

Building resilience in rural livelihoods against disasters and climate change is a major global challenge. Most existing models of livelihood diversification and disaster adaptation focus mainly on structural and economic factors, with less attention to the household behavioral and psychological characteristics that shape adaptive decision making under repeated shocks. This study examines how personality traits mediate the relationships between nutritional knowledge, market integration, and social capital, and the livelihood diversification strategies of livestock-raising households. In doing so, it addresses a gap in disaster risk and rural development research, which rarely incorporates psychological traits into diversification models. The research focuses on livestock households in disaster-prone regions of Indonesia: Aceh, Nusa Tenggara Timur, and South Sulawesi. Using data from a cross-sectional survey of 602 such households (response rate ≈ 94%), the study applied Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine mediation and moderation relationships among structural, cognitive, and behavioral factors. The measurement model showed reliability and validity (CR ≥ 0.70; AVE ≥ 0.50 with all indicator loadings above 0.70). The results indicate that nutritional knowledge and social capital are positively associated with livelihood diversification, both directly and indirectly through personality traits. Market integration, by contrast, had no significant direct association with diversification but did operate indirectly through personality traits, showing the importance of behavioral pathways that connect structural opportunities to livelihood strategies. Among the structural model factors, personality traits showed the strongest direct association with diversification, which suggests that behavioral dispositions are important determinants of livelihood diversification. Farm size significantly moderated the relationship between personality traits and diversification, meaning that resilience strategies differ by operational scale. By incorporating psychological factors into diversification models, this study offers new empirical evidence that livelihood resilience arises from the interaction between external resources and internal behavioral capacities. These findings suggest the potential value of combined interventions that pair nutrition education with behavioral skill building, strengthen market participation alongside entrepreneurial and risk management skills, and tailor social capital efforts to differences in farm scale. This research contributes to disaster risk and rural development scholarship by proposing a behavioral structural framework that integrates psychological traits with nutrition knowledge, market integration, and social capital to explain livelihood diversification among climate-vulnerable agricultural households.