Development and Standardization of Scale to Measure Role of Farm Women towards Natural Resource Management Activities

Abstract

Natural resources are important for human beings to sustain life on earth. However, continuous use of natural resources by the human beings, had affected the earth. There is need to manage our natural resources to improve the sustainability of the natural resources. Women have always come to forward to conserve and protect natural resources because they are the primary users of natural resources traditionally as well as modern. In this paper, A scale has been developed and standardized that can be used to measure the role of farm women towards natural resource management activities. The scale was developed by using the technique of “Scale Product Method” which combines the Thurston’s technique of equal appearing interval scale for selection of the items and Likert’s technique of summated rating for ascertaining the response on the scale. A total of 78 Natural Resource Management (NRM) activities were selected. Based on Scale (median) value and Q value, 72 Natural Resource Management (NRM) was selected to measure the role of farm women towards natural resource management activities. The co-efficient of reliability was calculated by the Rulon’s formula i.e. 0.81 and the content validity was observed thoroughly. The reliability and validity of the scale indicate its consistency and precision of the results. This scale can be used to measure the role of farm women in natural resource management activities.