portant outlet of surplus skim milk. Seven per cent of the dealers in Vermont, 

 six per cent in New Hampshire, and twelve per cent in Massachusetts report- 

 ed that they made cottage cheese as compared with 65 per cent of the West 

 Virginia dealers. 



Table 7 Facilities for Manufacturing of Surplus Milk, 

 Four Northeastern States, 1956-1957. 



Attitude of Dealers Toward Balancing 

 Milk Receipts with Fluid Sales 



To explore the reasons why independent dealers of small and medium size 

 operations choose to follow a particular procurement or disposal policy, it 

 was assumed that a measure of their attitude toward the balancing of milk 

 receipts with fluid sales would be related directly to their preferred method 

 of operation. The "scalogram analysis" method was selected for the measure- 

 ment of attitudes, as it has been demonstrated to be the most rigorous tech- 

 nique available for this purpose. 6 In as much as this is a relatively new 

 technique and its application to problems in agricultural marketing has not 

 been previously considered, some description of the method is incorporated 

 in the following discussion. 



Method of Analysis 



The same attitude schedule was used in all cooperating states. The ques- 

 tions included were pretested by an individual plant survey of milk dealers 

 in western New York State. The pretested questions were classified into four 

 areas of content, namely, the general content area and three sub-areas of 

 content which were termed economic, market restrictive, and personal. 7 The 

 first group of questions related to the overall attitude of the dealers toward 

 balancing receipts with fluid sales (general area). The second group of 

 questions related to the cost and returns involved in such a balancing opera- 



6 Jeffrey, Arthur D., "An Application of Scalogram Analysis in Agricultural Econ- 

 omics Research", Journal of Farm Economics, Vol. XL, No. 2, May 1958. 



7 Area of content is the attitude area being measured as defined by the questions. 



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