Community Radio and Women Empowerment: A Pragmatic Investigation

doi:10.7176/nmmc/83-02

Abstract

The socioeconomic growth of a country may be evaluated by the strength of its social communication system and infrastructure available to the masses: stronger the communication system, greater the rate of economic growth. India is a country with the utmost diversities in terms of geographical distribution, culture, caste, religion, language, rituals and beliefs. We have identified six indicators from available literature viz. social, political, economic empowerment, gender equality, participation in decision making and social status. These indicators were processed on the basis of data collected from women respondents engaged with community radio in their area of residence with the help of SPSS-20 and inferences were drawn pragmatically. The role of community radio (CR) has a moderate positive correlation with Political Empowerment (PE) followed by Gender Equality (GE), Social Empowerment (SE). Indicators like Participation in Decisions (PD), Social Status (SS) have a weak positive correlation. Economic Empowerment (EE) indicator was finally eliminated in the investigation process of women empowerment. We have simultaneously developed an abridged relationship between the dependent indicator and independents indicator that helped to understand the degree of variation in women empowerment that can be explained in terms of the degree of variation in its indicators of community radio. The variation in women empowerment has been explained by the community radio on various indicators and contribution of indicators. ANOVA was used to ascertain the differences in the mean values of all dependent indicators associated with the independent indicator (Women Empowerment). It was used to test the hypothesis with the help of Levene statistics. F test was used to find out the variance among the variables through the community radio and women empowerment. Key w ords: Community radio, women empowerment, socio-economic development, acrimony. DOI : 10.7176/NMMC/83-02 Publication date :September 30 th 2019

Highlights

The socio-economic development growth of a country can be evaluated by the strength of the available communication network system reachable to even all the marginalized society
On the basis of all possible and approachable as well as available relevant literature, research papers published in journals of repute, books, conceptual columns and various theories, we have identified women empowerment (WE) as predictor variable and awareness about www.iiste.org community radio (CR) as mediator variable, social empowerment (SE), political empowerment (PE), economic empowerment (EE), gender equality (GE), participation in decision making (PD), social status (SS) as the criterion variable
The score obtained from the analysis suggested an excellent fit between the data and the model (X2 =256.34, degree of freedom = 134, GFI = 0.912, Adjusted goodness-of-index (AGFI) = 0.911, Tucker –Lewis index (TLI) = 0.921, Comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.903, Normalized fit index (NFI) = 0.921, Root mean square of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.081) all the fit indices comply with the values recommended by Heir et al (1998)

Summary

Introduction

The socio-economic development growth of a country can be evaluated by the strength of the available communication network system reachable to even all the marginalized society. India is a country with paramount diversities in terms of geographical divisions with the allocation of diverse natural resources, different and diverse cultural practices, classifications of caste and caste related professions, four major religions along with some derived faiths and worshipping methods, many languages with local dialects and uncommon beliefs with major or minor deviations and various ideologies In addition to these major areas of diversities, there are hundreds of minor varieties of sub-caste, languages and community-based dialects. The information and entertainment needs are catered by All India Radio and Doordarshan (Television) along with hundreds of private broadcasters All these media are working on the notion that broadcasting covers a wide geographical area as well as a large population at any given time. The present scenario of broadcasting in the country and in the states needs some change and there is need of alternative medium of broadcasting and making of information and entertainment available through different programs to the narrow and remote area and to the unreached population

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