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- Effectiveness of Three Techniques of Identifying Leaders in Lam Pao...
Effectiveness of Three Techniques of Identifying Leaders in Lam Pao Irrigation Project, Northeast Thailand
Dissertation Abstract:
The study was conceptualized to determine the effectiveness of three techniques of identifying leaders who would then be trained and supported as key communications so that they could wield influence, identify common problems and transmit agricultural technology to other villagers.
The objective of the study was to compare three techniques, namely, the sociometric, the key informants’ rating, and the Department of Agricultural Extension (DOAE) techniques, and to find out which would yield the best village leaders.
Included in the study were the 12 villages in 3 districts covered by the Lam Pao Irrigation Project at Kalasin Province, Northeast Thailand. Personal interviews were used in obtaining pertinent data from 568 household heads. Statistical tools employed in data analysis were quartile location, chi-square test, Kendall’s coefficient of concordance, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, analysis of variance, and Turky’s w-procedure.
Results showed that the socioeconomic and key informants’ rating techniques were the most congruent in selecting leaders, followed by the key informants’ rating and DOAE’s techniques had the least congruence.
Although the villagers viewed all the leaders with high credibility, the sociometric leaders were looked up to with slightly higher credibility than the volunteer (DOAE) leaders and the informant leaders were considered the least credible.
The villagers had meager participation in personal and impersonal sources of farm information, but they tended to participate more with the selected leaders after the program had been launched. There were no significant differences in the acquisition of farm information, except for information on problem-solving for which sociometric and informant leaders were more contacted than volunteer leaders.
Sociometric, informant and volunteer leaders did not differ significantly with respect to identification of common problems.
Villagers in the sociometric group manifested the highest degree of changes in knowledge of and attitude toward agricultural innovations, followed by the informant group and the volunteer group, last. The sociometric leaders, therefore, had the highest performance in transmitting innovations and influence among the three types of leaders, while the volunteer leaders had the least performance.