Scale to measure attitude of dairy farmers’ towards foot and mouth disease vaccination

Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is a highly infectious and acute viral disease of cloven hooved animals and eradication of the disease through vaccination is the only choice in India because stamping out diseased animals is not possible due to socio-cuhural and economic reasons. FMD can be controlled effectively if the right attitude towards vaccination is inculcated among dairy farmers. It is high time to assess the attitude dairy farmers’ towards FMD vaccination. Keeping this in view, a standardized attitude scale was constructed to measure dairy farmers’ attitude towards FMD vaccination following the method of summated ratings. The process started with identifying the dimension, collection of items followed by relevancy and item analysis and checking the reliability and validity for precision and consistency of the results. A total of 36 statements were framed in which 12 statements were retained which has practical applicability in measuring the variable. A total of twelve statements with the highest ‘t’ values were chosen for the final scale, out of which 3 were positive and 9 were negative. The final scale satisfied the reliability test.