A Methodological Pathway to Quantify Perception of the Participants in Animal Fairs with relevance to National Dairy Mela at NDRI Karnal, India

Mela is the Hindi language word for fair, which is a traditional media to learn, earn, participate and share information. The paper describes perception scale development process and identification of different prospects of perception of the participants by administrating the tool on 60 randomly selected participants, during the three day event of national dairy mela from 25^th to 27^th February, 2015 at NDRI, Karnal. Final scale consisted of 20 statements (14 positive and 6 negative) for which the t-values were found to be significant at one percent level of significance at 18 df and Cronbach's alpha value of reliability was 0.851. Two other reliability tests were accomplished and Cochran's test of ANOVA was performed to test the significance level of all 3 reliability test and it was significant at 1 percent level (p<0.001). Content validity of the scale (S-CVI value) was 0.831. PCA extracted 4 prospects viz., ‘recognition prospect’, ‘learning prospect’, ‘get better prospect’, and ‘supportive prospect’. This methodological pathway viz., t-values cut-off for selection of statements based on degree of freedom rule, reliability triangulation, Cochran's test for reliability significance and extracting the latent constructs through PCA, can be followed by stakeholders for constructing different types of psychological scales. The attributes identified through PCA can be utilized in effective management and planning for organizing successful animal fairs.