Scale to measure farmers' perception of recommended fertilizer rate of Wheat.
2004
Elias Zerfu and Veerabhadraiah,V.
This paper reports on the development of a scale designed to measure the various perceptions farmers may have towards recommended fertilizer rate of wheat. Though research has been done to study adopters' characteristics, which explain adoption differences among farmers, little attention is given to study the differences between farmers in perceiving attributes of agricultural innovations in general and recommended fertilizer rate of wheat in particular. Not developed under Ethiopian conditions, the existing scales dealing with perception of agricultural technologies have been treating techn9ologies recommended for production of a certain crop in package form (which includes all inputs). For this study, newly created and existing items were used to form the item pool. These were sent to judges to study their relevance in defining the construct. The items, which were found relevant after getting judges, opinion, were used in item analysis. Item,-total correlation and alpha were used to decrease the size of scale and to observe internal consistency of the scale. The scale with the final size of 12 items was administered in Welmera Wereda, West Shoa zone, Oromia region of Ethiopia, for its reliability (split-half method) and validity (content validity). It was further grouped into three attributes (observability, compatibility and relative advantage) through factor analysis. These factors were able to explain 70.55 percent of the variance. Further, it was suggested to conduct cross-validity.
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This bibliographic record has been provided by Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research