Correlates of Field-Worker Performance in the Indonesian Family Planning Program: A Test of the Homophily-Heterophily Hypothesis

Abstract

With increasing use of fieldworkers in family planning programs has come increasing concern about variations in fieldworker performance. Not all of this wide variation in effectiveness can be attributed to differences in the receptivity to family planning of different communities. Data from the Indonesian family planning program which has used field workers from the beginning show that the most effective workers are female married older and less educated. That is they are much like the women who are potential acceptors. A 1:5 random sample of the 500 Indonesian fieldworkers showed that these generalities however do not explain all the differences in effectiveness. Individual variables occasionally reached a significant level but the partial correlation coefficients of the individual characteristics with the various measures of erformance (number of home visits referral cards distributed and acceptors per month) controlling for other characteristics are in all cases less than or equal to .10. Since the influence of area was minimized by the random areal sampling of the research design other influences should be suspected. Amont these perhaps the most important is personality of the worker. A high degree of extroversion and a high affiliative need might be associated with good performance. Further research on performance related to psychosocial variables would add to knowledge of determinants of performance and would help those responsible for recruitment.