Abstract:
Agricultural performance is measured in terms of production value of different crops at constant and current prices it helps to look at each crop in detail to understand the cost benefit ratio in terms of investment in rising the crop and profit obtained from the final yields. Due to the non-availability of standard scale to measure agricultural performance of farmers, it was thought that, there is a need to construct a scale to measure the agricultural performance. An attempt was made to develop a scale by using five points’ Likert type summated rating scale. For all four dimensions (Land/ Soil fertility index, Market index, Technology achievement index and Labour productivity index) of agricultural performance index. Initially 72 statements were framed and after discussion with the experts in the field of Resource Management and Consumer Sciences, these statements were reduced to 55 statements. Those 55 statements were given to 30 experts from different disciplines for content validity. All 30 experts’ data was entered in SPSS software. Both validity and reliability was done for all the statements. The reliability values of all four dimensions were greater than the standard value of alpha 0.7 as recommended by Cronbach, 1951. Regarding validity as per Kasier-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure, a measure of 0.6 was recommended. For all four dimensions, KMO values were greater than the standard value i.e. 0.6. Bartlett test of sphericity was done to know the overall significance of the correlation within a correlation matrix. Data of all four dimensions of the present study was found significant. Hence the present data was acceptable for factor analysis. Factor analysis or Principle Component Analysis was carried out by using SPSS; total three components were extracted for each dimension. PCA cut off point was 0.6 for all the four dimensions. By considering the PCA cut off point, finally 49 statements were retained and 6 statements were deleted.