A Resilience Scale to Measure Farmers’ Disenchantment towards Agriculture in National Calamity Hit Region of India: An Innovative Tool

Agriculture in present scenario is facing numerous challenges, among that one of the alarming trend shows that farmers in our country want to quit agriculture in mass extent. In this direction, the research was designed with the objective of developing a scale to measure resilience in relation to farmers’ profession (RFP-Scale) to know why farmers want to quit farming or what motivates them to sustain agriculture despite of numerous hardships. Therefore, the present study made an attempt to quantify the exact level of resilience of the farmers’ towards their profession. The process started with selection of 51 statements and finally 33 statements indicating the positive or negative resilience level were retained for scale development. The statements were edited in the light of the informal criteria suggested by Edwards. In order to find out the discriminating index for each item, ‘t’ value was calculated using the formula given by Edwards. The scale so developed finally consisted of 19 statements (9 positive and 10 negative) whose‘t’ values were found to be significant at one percent level of significance. The scale so developed can be used world-wide by research scholars, policy makers, governmental organizations, NGOs, scientists and civil societies to know the farmers’ quitting tendencies towards agriculture with suitable time and location specific modifications.