Attitude of Farmers Towards Farmer Distress - Development and Standardization of Attitude Scale for Farmers

Abstract

The issue of farmer’s distress is a vexed one. Distress is the result of a complex interplay of a myriad issues and risks. Because it will not be prudent to address the issue in isolation of the causative factors. Farmer’s distress is not due to indebtedness alone. There are several other factors such as farming related, psychological, sociological, situational, government related, Economic and Extension related factors that contribute signifi cantly to this. Due to the non-availability of a proper scale to measure farmer’s attitude towards farmer distress, it was thought necessary to construct a scale for the purpose. Keeping this in view, an attempt has been made to develop and standardization a scale for measuring the attitude of farmer towards farmer distress. Method of summated raring scale, by Likert (1932) was used. A total of 60 respondents were selected by random sampling method. Twenty-nine statements were selected from 62 statements for which ‘t’ values were worked out, whose values were highest i.e., t- values more than 1.75 were selected for fi nal scale. Farmers coming under highly favourable group under sustained distress sub head indicate that farmer is more distress and he is feeling helpless that may lead to depression and fatal consequences. Farmers who come under high attitude category of distress coping indicate that farmer has greater tendency to cope from the diffi culty situation and farmers willingness to try and develop coping mechanism.