Development of a scale to measure farmer’s attitude towards farming as an occupation

Abstract

Farming as a profession provides opportunities to contribute to the mission of eradicating hunger and enabling food security.Woman plays a very significant role in farming throughout rural India but in hilly regions their role become more prominent as farmer, given the migration of male members to towns as a widespread phenomenon.Thus, under the study for assessing the attitude of tribal farm women towards farming as an occupation a reliable scale was constructed. The scale was materialized to analyze hill women’s attitudes towards farming as an occupation which was conducted in Chamoli and Dehradun districts of Uttarakhand. The field survey was carried out among a sample of 200selected tribal farm women, 100 from each tribe i.e. Bhotiya and Jaunsari. The attitude in this study was operationalised as the degree of positive or negative feeling of farmers’ towards farming as anoccupation. The method of summated rating was followed in the development of the scale. Respondents were categorized according to their attitude level by using cumulative square root method. The study found that majority of the overall respondents (42.00 percent) were having favourable attitude followed by 39.50percent of the respondents having less favourable attitude and 18.50 percent having highly favourable attitude towards farming as an occupation. When compared ethnicity wise it was found that majority of respondents (63 percent) of Bhotiya tribe had less favourable attitude while majority of respondent (54 percent) of Jaunsari tribe had favourable attitude towards farming as an occupation.