The phenomenon of farmland abandonment threatens national food security. Analyzing farmers' motivations for abandoning farmland is crucial to addressing the predicament in governing farmland abandonment and ensuring the steady advancement of the rural revitalization strategy. Based on Q methodology, this study systematically identifies multi-dimensional motivational types underlying farmers' abandonment of cultivated land, revealing the complex psychological cognition and value-balancing logic behind their 'land-owning yet non-cultivating' behaviour. The research reveals that farmers' abandonment of cultivated land manifests in three distinct and markedly different motivational types: Rational calculation motivation reflects farmers' choice of seeking benefits and avoiding harms based on the "rational person" hypothesis, reflecting the profound transformation of farmers' value orientation towards marketization and utilitarianism in the process of agricultural modernization. Capability deprivation motivation manifests that abandonment is a forced response. Farmers, who lack alternative choices after having their feasible capabilities for agricultural production, are deprived by multiple structural factors. Normative compliance motivation embodies a behavioral logic in which farmers seek social identity, avoid social exclusion, and reduce psychological costs by following social norms. This confirms the deep restrictive role of informal rules, which transcend economic rationality, in farmers' decision-making processes.
WU et al. (Thu,) studied this question.