Using involvement to understand responses to biosecurity

The effectiveness of biosecurity measures at national borders is influenced by thebehaviour and levels of involvement of travellers. Involvement is the importance orrelevance of an object or situation to an individual. Involvement helps regulate theway in which people receive and process information and thus influences the extentof information searching for decision making, and information processing andpersuasion. In this study, we drew on the concept of involvement to investigate theresponse of individuals to New Zealand biosecurity requirements. A range of peopleassociated with the agricultural and food processing sectors were surveyed using afive item scale of involvement to measure their level of involvement in biosecurity.The results indicated that most respondents had medium to high levels ofinvolvement. This implies that respondents were motivated to attend to and processinformation on biosecurity measures. However, not all respondents reported takingnote of biosecurity information implying that involvement with biosecurity promptssome initial information processing which may or may not continue over time.