Assessing the Social Acceptance of Agricultural Drought Adaptation Measures in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province, Iran

Abstract

Drought causes many problems in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, a province in west of Iran. It threatens the farmers’ life and caused negative social and economic impacts on society. As a response, some adaptation measures were proposed, however social acceptance of the proposed measures became a problem. The objective of this study is to measure the social acceptance of proposed adaptation measures. To assess the social acceptance a structured questionnaire survey was conducted and a multistage stratified systematic sampling technique was used to select 386 households. A five point Likert scale was also used and the aggregate reliability of Likert type items for 23 items was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha, α=0.83. Results show that level of social acceptance is the highest in Saman and the lowest in Kouhrang district. Level of social acceptance is lower in Farsan and Kouhrang which are located in the high rainfall region. Result of Kolmogorov-Smirnov test shows that distribution of social acceptance values is not normal. Results of Kruskal-Wallis test show that there is a significant difference between the levels of social acceptance in 9 districts (H=199.019, 8 d.f., P=0).