Knowledge level assessment and influencing factors of vegetable growers in western Uttar Pradesh

The study was conducted in the Ghaziabad and Hapur districts of Uttar Pradesh to ascertain the level of knowledge possessed by vegetable growers through knowledge test and to determine the factors influencing it. A preliminary test of knowledge items was initially administered to 42 vegetable farmers for item analysis. The final items were included in the knowledge test based on the difficulty index (30 to 80), discrimination index (> 0.20) and point-biserial correlation coefficient (> 0.236). The reliability of the knowledge test was measured with the help of split-half method and reliability co-efficient was found to be 0.82, which indicates that this knowledge test is quite reliable. The test was further administered to 200 respondents and it was found that majority of the respondents (70.00%) had moderate level of knowledge, whereas 20.50 and 9.50% of farmers had low and high level of knowledge about vegetable farming. Furthermore, step-wise regression analysis showed that five independent variables, viz. education (X2), farm size (X3), extension contact (X6), extension participation (X7) and mass media exposure (X8) could explain 93.96% of the variation.