Effectiveness of opinion leaders in the agricultural information dissemination
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Date
2021
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Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana
Abstract
The kinetics of mechanisms involved in the diffusion of innovations has lead to the conceptual framework of diffusion studies as we see of now. The concept of opinion leaders and innovativeness and how their influence can drastically bring about changes within a social contagion has been widely studied throughout many fields, but it has been still underutilised in agricultural sector. For this reason, a quasi-experimental design was formulated in which three villages (two experimental and one control) were selected using multi-stage sampling. All the farmers within the three villages were selected as the respondents for the study. A baseline survey was conducted in all three villages to identify the opinion leaders as well as to identify the adoption status of PAU recommended vegetable nutrition garden. An intervention in the form of a training package (skill enhancement regarding vegetable nutrition garden management techniques, effective communication skills and motivational approaches to encourage farmers for innovation adoption) and incentives in the form of PAU vegetable seed kits were given to the opinion leaders of the first experimental group. The opinion leaders within the second experimental group were just given PAU vegetable seed kits while the control group was not given any treatment. A post-survey was then conducted to ascertain the effects of intervention on these experimental units. It was found that the training had positively influenced the adoption status as well the behaviour of the opinion leaders within the first experimental group leading to a significant increase in adoption level of PAU recommended vegetable nutrition garden among the fellow farmers as well. The second experimental group experienced a small but insignificant change in adoption status while the control group did not record any change in the adoption status.
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Citation
Sidharth. S (2021) Effectiveness of opinion leaders in the agricultural information dissemination (Unpublished M.Sc. thesis). Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India.