Jinhua College student interviewing rice farmer. Photo credit: Zhu Zeng Rong (Zhejiang University)

Many thesis students who are using the survey as their data collection procedure, will often develop attitude, belief or perception statements on the topic of their thesis, such as mothers’ attitudes toward prenatal care, college students’ female beauty ideal, students’ perceptions of the credibility of TV ads on alcoholic drinks, etc.  Developing attitude statements shouldn’t end there. After the survey has been done and the attitude data encoded in a spreadsheet and uploaded in SPSS, a key step is to calculate the reliability score of the scale.

In surveys, scales are often used to measure respondent beliefs, perceptions and attitudes. Results are then used to make inferences and judgments on intervention points that need to be addressed in subsequent upscaling initiatives. When a scale is used, it is a standard procedure in the social sciences to determine its reliability. A popular measure of reliability is Cronbach’s alpha which determines the internal consistency or average correlation of items in a survey instrument to gauge its reliability. Internal consistency estimates how consistently the respondents have responded to the items within the scale. The closer the Cronbach’s alpha is to 1, the higher the internal consistency (Gliem & Gliem, 2003). In social science, the widely accepted alpha is 0.70 or higher for a set of items to be considered a scale.

Farmer interview in Lingui County, China

We calculated the Cronbach’s alpha of the belief and attitude scale on non-rice habitats used in a baseline survey instrument. As items were worded either positively or negatively, reverse scoring was done to negatively worded statements. The items within the scale were drawn from focus group discussions (FGDs) with rice farmers in China, Thailand and Vietnam. We used a Likert-type scale, as follows:  Definitely not true, in most cases not true, may be true, in most cases true and always true. The attitude scale on ecological engineering included these items:

Uses of non-rice habitat

  • Non-rice habitats are sources of pests and diseases.
  • Non-rice habitats are home to natural enemies.
  • All plants in the non rice habitats are of no use to me.
  • Bunds have some beneficial flowers that attract natural enemies.
  • Increase in wild flowers on bunds can reduce need for insecticide sprays.
  • Increase in beneficial flowers on rice bunds can help the bees.
  • Bees are important for pollinating fruit trees.
  • Increasing the beneficial flowers on rice bunds will make our fields beautiful.
  • Increasing beneficial flowers on rice bunds can bring better health to farmers and their families.
  • The natural enemies that the beneficial flowers bring can help prevent planthopper outbreaks.
  • Increasing the beneficial flowers on rice bunds can reduce the rat population.
  • If farmers increase the beneficial flowers on rice bunds all year round, the population of beneficial insects will increase.
  • Maintaining more beneficial insects will lower BPH population.
  • Replacing plants growing on the bunds with cash crops will give farmers more income.
  • Maintaining non-rice habitat

  • Increasing beneficial flowers on the bunds is a waste of time.
  • Increasing beneficial flowers on bunds is easy to do.
  • It is difficult to increase beneficial flowers on bunds because nearby paddy fields use herbicide.
  • We cannot increase the beneficial flowers on bunds because we burn our rice straw.
  • Increasing beneficial flowers on bunds is additional burden to farmers
  • It is difficult to increase beneficial flowers on bunds because farmers will step on them.
  • Farmers should not apply herbicide on the bunds.
  • Our bunds are narrow so there is no place for beneficial flowers.
  • Bunds in rice fields should not have any plants on them.
  • I am willing to try increasing beneficial flowers in the bunds to learn more about what they can do.
  • Cronbach’s alpha from survey data

    Using SPSS, reliability of the attitude scale was computed. Table 1 shows that the reliability tests performed on the belief and attitude data generated an acceptable Cronbach’s alpha of higher than 0.70, with relatively higher alpha for data from Vietnam farmers. This suggests that the items in the attitude scale are related enough to combine into an attitude scale or index. For each data set, only 16 to 22 out of 25 items were used in the analysis. Some items were excluded in the computation to increase the reliability coefficient.

    Table 1. Cronbach’s alpha obtained from attitude scale data in target countries.

    Country Cronbach’s alpha Number of items
    China (Jinhua and Lingui) 0.713 16
    Thailand 0.717 22
    Vietnam 0.745 22

    T

    Chicago Navy Pier balloon. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/randz/3965296251/in/set-72157622355477395/

    For many months, the most popular post and queries in Devcompage has been “Writing the theoretical framework”.   Here’s a sample theoretical framework I wrote for a paper published in the International Journal of Pest Management.

    Motivating rice farmers in the Mekong Delta to modify pest management and related practices through mass media

    Huan, N,H,  H.V.Chien, P.V. Quynh,  P.S Tan, P.V. Du, M.M. Escalada , and K.L. Heong

    Theoretical Framework

    Theory of Social Learning

    The project applied social learning theory in developing interventions to motivate farmers to reduce seed sowing, nitrogen fertilizer application and insecticide application rates. Social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) stresses the importance of observational learning, imitation, and modelling to explain media effects on human behaviour. Through social modelling, an individual can adapt critical aspects of the behaviour they wish to adopt. Awareness and expectations of future reinforcements or punishments can have a major effect on an individual’s behaviour. As extrinsic factors are important in behaviour change, new behaviour is often learned through observing how others conduct themselves (Severin and Tankard, 2001).

    Theory of Planned Behaviour

    In developing the campaign approach and media materials, the project drew largely upon the strategic communication campaign framework (Adhikarya, 1994) and adapted the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1988) and the Theory of Reasoned Action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) to understand and promote individual behaviour change.

    The Theory of Reasoned Action asserts that intention to perform certain behaviour is determined by the individual’s attitude toward the performing the behaviour and by the subjective norm held by the individual. The theory has been applied to many health and campaigns relating to breastfeeding, AIDS, anti-smoking,  safety belt usage, and anti-drugs to determine which factors influence individuals to act in certain ways and to identify better ways of effectively communicating the message.

    The Theory of Planned Behaviour, an extension of the Theory of Reasoned Action, can help to explain why some media campaigns have limited success. Increasing knowledge alone does not help to change behaviour but campaigns aimed at attitudes and perceived norms in making adoption decisions produced better results. Studies of behavioural intentions suggest that the likelihood of intended audiences’ adopting a desired behaviour can be predicted. By assessing and understanding the factors we can develop messages to influence their attitudes and perceptions of benefits of the behaviour and how their peers will view their behaviour. Research by Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) supports the idea that individuals’ and society’s (perceived) attitudes are important determinants of action. Therefore, an important step toward influencing behaviour is an assessment of intended audience attitudes. We can subsequently monitor these attitudinal changes.

    Newspaper boxes during winter in Chicago. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/randz/

    After the holidays, I noticed an upsurge in reader interest in the topic, “Writing the theoretical framework, conceptual framework and thesis topics”. Let me give you some freebie topics that I strongly recommend you adapt (modify to suit your requirements) to conform to your devcom or masscom thesis topic requirements:

    1) News Media Use and Knowledge about the 2010 Presidential Elections:  Why Exposure Matters in Voter Learning

    2) Influence of Philippine political-social commentary blogs and Facebook accounts on readers’ awareness and opinions on current issues

    3) Impact on knowledge exchange and social mobilization of blogs: the case of Marketmanila.com

    4) Gratifications from social interactions in a food blog: the case of Marketmanila.com

    5) Information exchange and motivations of food blog readers to seek and share: the case of Marketmanila.com

    6) Source credibility dimensions of popular Philippine political-social commentary blogs and Facebook accounts — ML Quezon III, The Professional Heckler, Dean Jorge Bocobo, etc.

    7) Senior citizens’ readership and information seeking from special interest blogs: do they read and share?

    Will appreciate your comments.

    Christmas lantern in the Philipines. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bingramos/49794352/

    Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone.  Students and teachers are now on Christmas vacation so things around Devcompage will be slow for the next two weeks. I will be in Chainat and Bangkok, Thailand next week to conduct focus group discussions with rice farmers to get a sense of what’s going on and understand how they are coping with massive brown planthopper (BPH) outbreaks.

    I wish everyone peace, good health,  wealth and happiness in the coming year.

    by
    Jed Asaph D. Cortes
    BS Development Communication student
    Visayas State University
    Visca, Baybay, Leyte, Philippines

    Jed Asaph Cortes and their SCUAA website

    Note:  Jed conducted this research and wrote this report as a requirement in a course on evaluation of communication materials.

    On October 25-30, the Visayas State University hosted the 25th Regional State Colleges and Universities Athletic Association (SCUAA) Games. The celebration of its silver year is elemental since SCUAA in Region VIII was born in this university while it was still Visayas State College of Agriculture (ViSCA). Therefore, holding the Games in its place of birth makes it considerably one of the Region’s highlights for 2009.

    As part of VSU’s hosting, the SCUAA 2009 Executive Committee has decided to put up an online resource to augment promotions and information dissemination. Since VSU’s web servers for our official website (http://www.vsu-visca.edu.ph) have been down for quite a time, the Online Promotions Committee has decided to host a blog as the official website for the 2009 SCUAA Games: http://vsuscuaa.org. The web administrators also started a Facebook Fan Page for SCUAA 2009 at VSU since the advent of the Facebook News Feed is a good avenue to disseminate updates about SCUAA and its preparations.

    Since hosting websites to promote special occasions like SCUAA 2009 is new to VSU, the need to receive feedback of online visitors will be a good rule to measure the effectiveness of these online resources.

    Research objectives

    Audience analysis was carried out to determine the visitors’ socio-demographic profile, online access, and their attitudes and behavior towards the online resource.

    Online survey tool

    Since the target audience of this audience analysis are visitors of the online resource, an free online survey tool was used to construct the web-ready (clickable) questionnaire. Since it is free, the survey was allowed only to take as much as 25 respondents. The URL of the survey was http://scuaa2009.speedsurvey.com/ (now closed).

    Data processing and analysis

    The data from the questionnaires were encoded in the spreadsheet program Microsoft® Excel®. The data was analyzed in SPSS 15.

    Results

    Profile of respondents

    Most of the respondents who took the online survey turned out to be college students in VSU. College respondents consist 82.6% while high school and graduates were starkly lower in number, 13% and 4.3% respectively.

    Three out of four respondents come from Visayas State University. This is because of the networking capabilities of Facebook, where the online survey was advertised. Since the survey started from VSU, fans who are nearer VSU’s FB network must have had more chances of being invited to complete the survey.

    Only one out of five respondents (20.8%) own a weblog while almost all own a Facebook account (95.8%).

    Continue reading …

    Anna Lourdes C. Javier and Shanemie Carelle O. Daquio, BS Devcom students, texting on their cell phones

    Anna Lourdes Javier and Shanemie Carelle O. Daquio, VSU college students, using their mobile phones. Photo credit: A.L. Javier & Jed Asaph Cortes

    Has cell phone use reduced the time you used to spend on reading newspapers, magazines and books, watching television, listening to the radio or conversing with family and friends? Despite our extraordinary ability for multi-tasking,  some traditional communication activities have to give way to the the new media.

    One senior BS Devcom student in our university will tackle that research question.  With her permission, here are her thesis title and the key questions that she adapted from previous research and developed to measure the key variables in her thesis:  motivations for cell phone use and displacement effects.

    The Beeps and Tunes of a Portable Lifestyle:  Motivations and Displacement Effects of Mobile Phone Use Among VSU College Students

    By: Anna Lourdes C. Javier
    Thesis Adviser:  Avril Adrianne B. De Guzman

    Objectives

    Generally, this study aims to find out what motivates VSU college students to use mobile phones and the displacement effects of its use.

    Measurement

    Motivations for cell phone use will be measured as follows:

    Cognitive needs (acquiring information, knowledge or understanding)
    - communication facilitation and entertainment
    - cost-efficiency
    - immediate access
    - mobility

    Personal integrative needs (strengthening credibility, confidence and stability)
    - communication facilitation and entertainment
    - reassurance
    - self-gratification/dependency
    - security
    - functionality
    - instrumentality

    Social integrative needs (strengthening credibility, confidence and stability)
    - communication facilitation and entertainment
    - strengthening contact with family and friends
    - affection/sociability

    Displacement effects- refers to the media activities that are reduced/replaced when the respondents use their mobile phone. It will be measured by the following questions:

    About how many hours and minutes in a typical week do you spend on the following activities:

    Activity
    Number of
    Hours/Week
      Using the Internet
      Watching the television
      Texting on your mobile phone
      Reading newspapers
      Calling on your mobile phone
      Listening to radio
      Playing sports and other games
      Interacting with family members
      Socializing with close friends face-to-face outside of school

    Did you experience a decrease or increase in your use of other media after you got a mobile phone? If yes, please indicate the extent to which your use of the following media changed when you began using mobile phones.

    Read more …

    Yellow flowers in Cai Be district, Tien Giang province, Vietnam

    Lantana flowers grown on the other side of the rice bunds

    How can we communicate the current buzzwords, biodiversity and ecological engineering, to farmers?  Ecological engineering principles mean modifying the environment, both in space and time, to enhance ecosystem services.  In our ADB-IRRI planthopper project , our task next year is to scale up farmers’ ecological engineering practices in China, Thailand and Vietnam.  We started by understanding farmers’ decisions and employed sociological and anthropological tools that include focus group discussions, ethnoscience techniques, and farmer survey.  From these social science techniques, we learned that the easiest way for farmers to understand ecological engineering is through planting flowering plants on the rice bunds.

    In a community project, rice farmers in Cai Be, Tien Giang province are working together to plant yellow flowers on the bunds. The nectar-rich yellow flowers provide food to natural enemies which can control insect pests, such as the brown planthopper.  In Cai Lay district,  yellow flowers are planted on 27 km of rice bunds.

    A 35-hectare farmers' fields with yellow flowers on the bunds

    On one side of the bunds, farmers have planted a row of yellow flowers and another row of sesame (Sesamum indicum L.),  a drought-tolerant annual. Planting flowers on bunds provides regulating and cultural services such as aesthetic beauty and cultural values in rice systems, an area that tends to appeal to women more. Besides their aesthetic values,  maintaining flowers on bunds is connected to protecting human health, a primary concern of women, mothers in particular.

    Community project signboard

    Billboard of community level management of ecological engineering, Cai Be, Tien Giang, Vietnam

    Lingui county, Guilin, China landscape

    Lately, many students have asked me to do their assignments for them. I have said it before that as a rule I don’t do students’ assignments as it will encourage laziness.  If those students only bothered to read “About” in Devcompage and saw my qualifications, they would surely have second thoughts about asking me to do their work. Or cringe in embarrassment.

    The root cause is that many universities offer degree programs in communication without the requisite instructional resources to support their course offerings.  This and students’ lack of skill in searching information on the web. Here’s what students should do:

    1) When given a topic for a class report, clarify it with your teacher. What does he or she mean? You have to be clear about the topic yourself so that you will know what you will look for. Read “Ask Devcompage” for examples.

    2) Once the topic has been clarified, write the term in Google, Metacrawler, and other search engines.

    • Surround search terms in quotation marks.  Example: science communication. Write “science communication” so that the search engine won’t look for science and communication separately.
    • Use other search engines:  Yahoo, Metacrawler, Altavista, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, Bing, and others.

    3) Examine  the links and click those that you think have some promising information for you.

    4) Search again in Google by stating the search terms (or topic) in different ways, like variations on a theme.

    5) Always properly attribute your Internet sources so you won’t violate intellectual property rights.

    SAGE-logo-with-a-clear-background

    I just received an email alert from SAGE publications about its offer for free online trial to its  journals in Communication and Media Studies. SAGE is currently offering free full-text access to 25 key journals for two months until 31st December 2009.

    All you have to do is register here. Once registered you will be able to browse abstracts, perform quick or advanced keyword searches, and download full-text articles from all of the journals listed below (some of which are ISI ranked):

    APA publication manual

    APA publication manual, 6th ed.

    With the Internet just a few keystrokes away, many students often refer to online sources for their thesis research.  As thesis adviser, I encourage my students to refer to journals, books, and other printed materials to beef up their Introduction and Review of Literature.  Easy access to the web points up the serious issue of plagiarism. My advice to students is:

    • Cite all references for borrowed ideas.
    • Paraphrase or restate borrowed ideas and cite source.
    • If the text is not paraphrased, put them in quotation marks.

    How should then one cite online sources? In the social sciences, most of us refer to the American Psychological Association (APA) formatting guide. In its 5th edition, the APA suggests the following style for information obtained from electronic sources:

    The source may be aggregated databases, online journals, Web sites or pages, newsgoups, Web- or e-mail based discussion groups or Web or e-mail based newsletters. Pagination in electronic references is unavailable in many cases, thus left out of the citation.

    The publication date should be the year of publication or the most recent update. If the date of the source cannot be determined, place (n.d.) after the author’s name. Since web sources can change, provide the date of your search. The reference includes the URL that will direct readers a close as possible to the information cited. The best way to make sure that the URL is entered correctly is to copy it from your browser and paste it into the reference.

    The path information should be sufficient for someone else to retrieve the material. For example, specify the method used to find the material: the protocol (Telnet, FTP, http://, etc.), the directory, and the file name. Do not end the path statement with a period. When possible, give the URL of the document used, rather than a home page. If the URL leads to information on how to obtain the cited material, enter “Available from” instead of “Retrieved from.”

    Online periodical

    Muilenburg, L., & Berge, Z. (2000). A framework for designing questions for online learning. The American Journal of Distance Education. Retrieved February 21, 2006, from: http://www.emoderators.com/moderators/muilenburg.html

    Online document

    Devi, S. S. E., & Ramachandran, V. (2002). Agent based control for embedded applications. Retrieved December 16, 2006, from http://www.hipc.org/hipc2002/2002Posters/AgentControl.pdf

    No Author. When there is no author for a Web page, the title moves to the first position of the reference entry:

    New child vaccine gets funding boost. (2001). Retrieved March 21, 2001, from http://news.ninemsn.com.au/health/story_13178.asp

    No author, no year.

    GVU’s 8th WWW user survey. (n.d.). Retrieved September 19, 2001, from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-1997-10/

    Style list for references. (n.d.). Retrieved January 1, 2001, from http://www.apa.org

    Citing computer software

    Arend, D. N. (1993). Choices (Version 4.0) [Computer software]. Champaign, IL: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Research Laboratory. (CERL Report No.CH7-22510)

    Article in an Internet-only journal

    Kawasaki, J. L., & Raven, M. R. (1995). Computer-administered surveys in extension. Journal of Extension, 33, 252-255. Retrieved June 2, 1999, from http://joe.org/joe/index.html

    Article in an Internet-only newsletter

    Waufton, K. K. (1999, April). Dealing with anthrax. Telehealth News, 3(2). Retrieved December 16, 2000, from http://www.telehearlth.net/subscribe/newslettr_5b.html#1

    Internet technical or research reports

    University of California, San Francisco, Institute for Health and Aging. (1996, November). Chronic care in America: A 21st century challenge. Retrieved September 9, 2000, from the Robert Wood Foundation Web site: http://www.rwjf.org/library/chrcare

    Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. (2001, March 14). Glacial habitat restoration areas. Retrieved September 18, 2001 from http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/land/wildlife/hunt/hra.htm

    Read more ….

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