The Renewal of the Kibbutz: From Reform to Transformation

Appendix. Date Sources and Statistical Analytics

125 APPENDIX: DATA SOURCES AND STATISTICAL ANALYTICS In several chapters we present quantitative portraits of the process and consequences of innovation in the kibbutzim. The purpose of this appendix is to provide documentation of the samples and data used in our statistical analyses, and to explain the approaches we used in analyzing the data. Surveys of Changes in Kibbutzim Chapters 2 through 4 make use of data derived from surveys of changes in kibbutzim conducted annually by the Institute for Research of the Kibbutz at the University of Haifa from 1990 through 2001. We begin this appendix by providing additional information about this survey. Survey Content and Responses The annual surveys carried out by the Institute for Research of the Kibbutz were conducted in association with the two major kibbutz federations, and their aim was to include all of the reforms that were being introduced or being discussed on one or more kibbutzim at the time of a given survey. The primary sources of this information were publications of the kibbutz movements. Until their recent merger, both Takam and the Artzi federation produced weekly newsletters. Now the combined kibbutz movement puts out a single newsletter; the articles for these newsletters are written by professional journalists, not office holders, and this helps to make them informative and up to date. Another important source of changes included in annual surveys was the reports of change committees. Because the kibbutzim promised the 126 APPENDIX government in1989 that they would introduce reforms, many set up change committees in the early1990s. It was the charge of these committees to collect ideas for change from other kibbutzim, and then to use these as a basis for making proposals for changing their own kibbutz. Reports of change committees soon began to be circulated from one kibbutz to another. Reports of change committees were useful primarily at the beginning of the 1990s, as were the proposals of reformers like Yehuda Harel and Dudik Rutenberg. In later years, the Institute’s researchers became increasingly dependent on what they were hearing other kibbutz members talk about. To survey the kibbutzim about a change, the change had to have a name. In 1990 the terms used to describe many changes varied from kibbutz to kibbutz. Many terms were ambiguous, ambivalent, or politically charged. For example, having members pay for electricity was called privatization of electricity in one kibbutz and not in another. Researchers at the Institute worded items for the questionnaire in the most general terms possible, but added a supplementary instruction to the kibbutz secretaries who were filling out the forms, noting that some changes might be known by different names. In years after 1990, researchers conducting the survey continued to monitor changes being proposed in kibbutz journals, and asked their colleagues at the Institute if they knew of other changes that needed to be added. For a change to be added to the survey, at least one kibbutz had to be already using it, or at least one kibbutz journal had to be proposing it. The intention was to keep a new proposal on the questionnaire for one or two years, and then to drop it if no one took up the idea. To make room for new proposals, a number of questions were deleted from the survey, over the years. Accepting children of nonmembers in kibbutz daycare facilities and schools was dropped from the survey in 1996, because it appeared to have been decided by consensus. By that time, 89.7 percent of kibbutzim were reporting that they were doing this, and the few kibbutzim not doing it began to add excuses for their exceptional behavior, such as that they had no Jewish neighbors. The “comprehensive budget,” similarly, had become widely accepted (74.7 percent) by the time it was dropped from the survey in 1996, the year in which it began to be displaced by the new “safety-net budget.” “Members paying for electricity,” APPENDIX 127 however, was retained in all years of the survey, for use in identifying conservative kibbutzim that were unusually immune to change. Some items were dropped from the survey because of validity problems . One set of such problems arose when questions tried to differentiate between two or more similar-sounding reforms. For example, kibbutzim had created boards of directors for factories, for farms, for all kibbutz productive activities, and for the kibbutz as a whole; in 1999, the survey...