Attitudinal Research Relating to Farmers' Use of Short-Term Credit

Summary : Guttman scale analysis is a useful and not too difficult way of arranging the attitudes of a group of respondents on a continuum of favorableness-unfavorableness. It is a way of recording and analyzing subjective attitudes of people, and of quantifying them as the usual economic factors are quantified. It requires a certain familiarity on the part of the researcher with the attitudes under study, and a little patience in working out a set of statements that fall on a single continuum. Guttman scale analysis was found to be a useful addition to other methods in studying reasons for the use and nonuse of credit and insurance by dryland farmers. Both rank correlation and paired comparisons are available to the researcher who wants a simple, ordinal, preference ordering of items. These items may be attitudes, policies, preferred actions, or anything else that is meaningful to the respondent. We prefer paired comparisons to the rank correlation because this method gives scale separation between items, as well as the rank order. Both methods are limited to a relatively short list of items, unless the respondents are a selected group with a great deal of patience. These three techniques can be tested for statistical validity and otherwise manipulated to reveal the presence or absence of concomitant influences, upon which hypotheses are founded or upon which they founder. Fellow researchers who deal with socio-economic activities, such as farm management, may find these techniques useful