A Scale to Measure the Psychological Impact on Farmers during Pandemic Conditions (Covid-19)

Abstract

The recent outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic resulted in global lockdown creating huge economic cost and cascading impact on different sections of society including the farming community. The farmers though directly faced socio economic impact there reported psychological distress due to anxiety, depression etc. Hence the objective of measuring the psychological impact of Covid-19 on farming community was taken up. As there were no proper measuring instruments for measuring the psychological impact especially of the farmers, a need was thus realized for constructing a specific scale. Hence, the Likerts summated rating scale procedure was followed by considering 8 dimensions. Initially 110 statements were sent to judges rating and the statements with relevancy weightage of 0.80 and above were retained. Then it was administered to farmers in non sample area for item analysis and after ‘t’ test 32 statements were retained. The Cronbach’s alpha test to measure the internal consistency of components was 0.895 and the split half method, followed for measuring the items reliability showed ‘r’ is 0.734. The scale validity was measured using face and content validity. Thus the scale has both validity and reliability. The finally developed scale consists of 32 statements under 8 different dimensions.