Development of a scale to measure the attitude of the farmers towards Geographical Indications in agriculture

Introduction

The prime economic function of GI protection is to maintain the goodwill and reputation of the product in the market and thus expand access to the market for better revenues. However, this is influenced by personal, socio-economic and policy related factors. These factors are likely to influence the attitude of stakeholders towards the existing systems of intellectual property rights of indigenous products. Stakeholders' attitude towards GI is crucial in achieving the objectives of instituting various mechanisms for ensuring the intellectual property rights of farmers. Understanding the attitude of the farming community would help us initiate corrective measures to make the systems more efficient and effective. In the current age of market competition, it is important that we investigate the patterns of attitudinal shifts of stakeholders towards the concept of farmers rights on intellectually protected indigenous products. Allport (1935) [1] defined attitude as a mental and neural state of readiness organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all related objects and situations. The general attitude of the farmers towards GI was measured using an attitude scale developed for the purpose.

Methodology Locale of study and sampling plan

For the construction of attitude scale, thirty non-sample respondents from were taken. Later, for calculating reliability of the developed attitude scale, thirty fresh nonsample respondents were taken. Further, the developed attitude scale was administered to 200 respondents in the study area to measure the farmer's attitudes towards GI in agriculture. The products selected for the study were Kaipad rice, Changalikkodan nendran, Marayoor jaggery and Tirur betelvine and thus Kannur (Kaipad r̥ īce), Thrissur (Changalikkodan banana), Idukki (Marayoor jaggery) and Malappuram (Tirur betel leaf) districts respectively were the concerned districts with these products. From each of the four identified GI products, 50 farmers involved in the particular GI production were randomly selected, making a sample size of 200 farmers.

I. Scale construction

A scale was constructed to measure the attitude of farmers following the method of summated rating suggested by Likert (1932) and Edwards (1969) [5] . A summated rating scale is a set of attitude statements all of which are considered of approximately equal attitude value and to each of which subjects respond with degrees of agreement or disagreement carrying different scores. This method was adopted for the present study because, the use of single statement to represent a concept is avoided and instead several statements as indicators, all representing different facets of the concept to obtain a more well-rounded perspective can be used. The important steps adopted for the scale construction were;

Collection and editing of statements:

A set of potential scale items, which can be rated on a 1-to-5 Disagree-Agree response scale, was created. Creation of items involved the engagement experts from the relevant fields of agricultural extension and agricultural economics. Besides this, www.extensionjournal.com available literature on GI registration and stakeholders' attitudes towards it was also referred to. A total of 89 statements were collected, which were organized and structured in the form of items to measure attitude. The statements were then edited keeping in mind the criteria developed by Edward (1957) [4] . The process ended up in generation of 55 items.

Relevancy test:

To examine the statements for their relevancy in measuring the attitude of farmers towards GI, the items collected in the first step were subjected to expert scrutiny by a panel of judges from the above fields. The statements were presented to a panel of thirty experts for relevancy judgment on a five-point Likert scale of relevancy viz., most relevant, relevant, neutral, irrelevant, and least relevant with scores 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1, respectively. Now, the total relevancy score of each item was calculated by summing the scores of the judges' responses to that item. Afterwards, we worked out the relevancy percentage, relevancy weightage, and mean relevancy for all the 55 statements individually by using the following formulae. a. Relevancy percentage: Relevancy percentage was worked out by summing up the scores of highly relevant, relevant, and neutral categories, which were converted into percentage.

b. Relevancy weight (RW) c. Mean Relevancy Score (MRS)

The statements having a relevancy percent above 60, relevancy weightage above 0.60 and mean relevancy score above 2.5 were then selected. The total number of statements retained after this relevancy screening process was 55. These statements were further rephrased and edited based on the judges' remarks.

Item analysis:

In the next step of scale construction, statements retained in the previous procedure were administered to 32 non-sample respondents for pilot testing.

They were asked to score the statements on a five-point continuum viz., strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, and strongly disagree with scores of 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1, respectively, and a reverse scoring pattern was adopted in negative statements. The score obtained by each respondent was calculated. Based on the total score, upper and lower 25 per cent of the subjects were selected as criterion groups for calculating value. The responses were then summed up to obtain a total score on each item. The critical ratio was calculated by t-test. Items or statements were selected on the basis of higher t value over a cut-off point of 1.75.

Reliability test:

Reliability of the testing instrument is the ability to give dependable, consistent, stable and accurate measurement score in repeated testing with same instrument. For testing the reliability of the scale, the total set of responses was taken into consideration. The reliability of the scale was measured using Cronbach's Alpha, and the reliability coefficient was found to be 0.73, which is satisfactory.

Validity test:

Validity is the ability of a measuring instrument to measure what it is intended to measure. The validity of the sensitization scale was measured with the jury's opinion method. Content validity, according to Anastasi (1968) [3] , entails a systematic analysis of the test content to see if it covers a representative sample of the behaviour area to be assessed. As shown in the Table 1, selection of items for the final scale was made after calculating the t-value for all items. Those items with t-values equal to or greater than 1.75 were finally selected and included in the attitude scale. It was observed that 44 statements were found to have values more than 1.75, and 26 items were discarded from the list due to their lower value on item analysis, which is marked with a star (*). The range of the t value was 0 (lowest) and 3.58 (highest). According to Edwards, a t-value above 1.75 for any item has high discriminating power, which could be placed in the final attitude scale. Following this criterion, 34 items were included in the attitude scale. Items that were not classified by the majority of judges as either positive or negative with regard to the attitudinal object were eliminated from consideration for use in the final scale, ensuring the robustness of the final scale. www.extensionjournal.com Reliability, according to Ray and Mondal, relates to the precision or accuracy with which a measurement or score is taken. According to Kumar (2021) [6] , a test is said to be dependable when it consistently produces the same results when applied to the same sample. The split-half model reliability coefficient was 0.731, according to the reliability data for the developed attitude scale (Spearman brown coefficient). The reliability coefficient revealed that the attitude scale devised had a high internal consistency, which is the most important aspect of attitude scale creation because it demonstrates the scale's robustness. According to the American Psychological Association (1966) [2] , the representativeness or sampling adequacy of the content substance, matter, and themes of a measuring instrument is known as content validity. The scale was developed with the help of 30 judges who reviewed all of the revised statements, and the experts' recommendations were included in the scale. As a result, the content validity of the current scale was duly met. Finally, 34 items were considered to assess farmers' attitudes toward the GI in agriculture, and they were structured in such a way that positive and negative words appeared at random to avoid biased answers. Against each of the 34 items, there were five columns representing a five-point continuum of agreement or disagreement to the item, as followed by Likert (1932). The points on continuum are strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree and strongly disagree with respective weight of 4, 3, 2, 1 and 0 respectively for favorable (positive) item and with weight of 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively for unfavorable (negative) item.

Conclusion

Geographical indication as an intellectual property right is gaining attraction and becoming highly relevant. The attitude of stakeholders toward GI in agriculture is critical as it determines the success of GI, especially in completing post-GI operations. The measurement tool created can assist researchers, policymakers, and anyone interested in determining farmers' attitudes towards the GI in each location. The scale may aid them in conducting baseline surveys to make policy decisions on GI and post-GI aspects and design awareness programmes. The created tool has a reliability of reliability coefficient of 0.73, which may be termed as highly consistent and, hence, usable in varied conditions.

References

1. Allport GW. The historical background of modern social psychology. In: Handbook of Social Psychology. 1968.
2. American Psychological Association, American Educational Research Association, National Council on Measurement in Education. Standards for educational and psychological tests and manuals. American Psychological Association; 1966.
3. Anastasi A. Psychological Testing. MacMillian Company, London; 1968.
4. Edward AL. Techniques of Attitude Scale Construction. Vakils, Feffer and Simons Inc, New York; 1957.
5. Edwards AL. Techniques of attitude scale construction. Vakils and Simon Pvt. Ltd., Bombay; 1969.
6. Kumar SS, Singh BP, Chander M, Suman RS. Development of a scale to measure the attitude of animal husbandry personnel towards using ICAR-IVRI Crystoscope. Ind J Ext Edu. 2021;57(4):150-152.