Forest ownership objectives and their connection with forestry activities: a confirmatory approach to studying gender differences

Research suggests that gender is an important factor explaining the differences of forest owners. Nonetheless, little research has focused on gender. Results from a questionnaire (n = 6558) conducted in Finland are utilised to study the gender, forest owner objectives and their connection with forest owner activity. This paper aims to validate a five-dimensional forest ownership objective structure utilising confirmatory factor analysis. Furthermore, gender differences between objectives and forest owner activity are studied. Based on the confirmatory analysis, results support the five-dimensional objective structure with women and men forest owners. Further analysis indicates that income is the only objective connected with activity and the relationships between the objectives and activity differ between genders. This model is the first to connect forest ownership dimensions with activities related to forest ownership in a confirmatory factor analysis. Understanding that only income-related objectives correlate with activity may help in understanding forest owners with diversifying objectives.