The selected items were converted into a questionnaire which combined the following elements:
■ open-ended questions were used to ask for farmers’ practices, reason for choosing those prac-tices, farmers’ knowledge about the ricefield ecosystem, observed effects of pesticides and farm-ers’ experience with IPM;
■ questions were asked in a closed manner only when it was felt that all possible alternatives were known; in that case, the respondent could choose between pre-formulated categories (e.g.
sex of respondent; land ownership; source of water; planting methods);
■ one set of questions consisted of statements related to pest management to which the farmers could either agree, disagree or not express any opinion. They were then asked to explain their answer;
■ in addition, enumerators made their own observations on field characteristics.
The questionnaire was administered to 229 farmers (115 trained, 114 untrained) from 19 villages in Antique province in November 1993. IPM-FFS were conducted in Antique for the first time during the second crop of the crop year 1991/92; since then, there have been FFS in every cropping season. At the time of the survey, the FFS covering the first crop of crop year 1993/94 had just been completed.
These latest FFS sites were not included in the survey because it was expected that the trained farmers had not yet implemented what they had learned.
Out of the 29 barangays102 in which IPM-FFS had been conducted up to the first crop of 1993, 19 barangays were selected according to the following criteria:
■ out of each municipality, at least two barangays should be included to account for differences in location factors; this was not possible in Tibiao and San Remigio since there had been only one FFS in these municipalities before the first crop of 1993;
■ within each municipality, every season in which IPM-FFS had been conducted should be in-cluded in the sample; thus, if FFS had been conducted in more than two seasons in a municipal-ity, there would be more than two barangays from this municipality included in the sample;
■ if more than one FFS had been conducted in the same season in the same municipality, one or two of them would be randomly selected and included in the sample; the remaining sites would
101In the development of a simple additive index, item scores should fall within the same range of values, other-wise weights are assigned indirectly to individual items (Schnell et al. 1995).
102A barangay is the smallest administrative unit in the Philippines. In rural areas, a barangay is equivalent to a village, while in urban areas, barangays delineate certain districts within a town.
Table 8.1. Scoring procedure in the construction of a scale for IPM.
Indicator Score
Use of insecticides yes = 0 points
no = + 1 point
Use of herbicides yes = 0 points
no = + 1 point
Use of molluscicides yes = 0 points
no = + 1 point Application of insecticides during the first 30 days of the cropping cycle yes = 0 points
no = + 1 point
Use of rice straw burn = 0 points
don’t burn = + 1 point Use of organic fertilizer (other than rice straw) yes = + 1 point
no = 0 points
Use of ‘old’ rice varieties (before IR-60) 0 points
Use of ‘new’ rice varieties (after and including IR-60) + 1 point Farmer’s attitude towards the following statement:
‘The use of chemical pesticides will increase rice yields’ disagree = + 1 point depends = + 0.5 points no opinion = 0 points agree = 0 points Farmer’s attitude towards the following statement:
‘If the leaves are damaged early in the cropping season it is important to spray’ disagree = + 1 point depends = + 0.5 points no opinion = 0 points agree = 0 points Farmer’s attitude towards the following statement:
‘There are enough natural enemies in the field to control the rice pests’ agree = + 1 point depends = + 0.5 points no opinion = 0 points disagree = 0 points Expected yield loss if no insecticides are used none = + 1 point
little (<10%) = + 0.5 points much (>10%) = 0 points it depends = + 0.5 points Farmer correctly identifies insects/spiders presented + 0.25 points per pest
to him/her as harmful or beneficial + 0.33 points per beneficial
organism104
103Indicators refer to the first cropping season of the crop year 1993/94.
104These are in fact two items: identification of pests and identification of beneficial organisms. The sample of insects presented to the farmers consisted of 4 pests (ricebug, leafhopper, stemborer, armyworm) and 3 ben-eficial organisms (spider, damselfly, ladybeetle). Identifying all pests was deemed equivalent in weight to identifying all beneficial organisms, and the complete solving of each item should score a maximum of one point, thus 0.25 points per pest and 0.33 points per beneficial organism.
be left out.
In each barangay, 6 trained and 6 untrained farmers were interviewed. Since the selected FFS had on average 26 participants, roughly 25 % of them could be covered which seemed to be a good basis for analysis. With 19 barangays and 12 farmers per barangay, the total sample size amounted to 229 (accidentally, one additional trained farmer was interviewed).
Trained farmers were selected at random from a list of all participants in the FFS. If the selected farmers were not available, others were chosen following the same procedure. Selection of untrained farmers was more difficult. Originally, it was planned that each trained farmer who was interviewed would introduce the enumerator to an untrained farmer whose field would not be adjacent to his field. It was presumed that exchange of agricultural information would take place in the field and that neighboring farmers could influence each other, so that the untrained farmer could not really be called untrained anymore. By having the randomly chosen trained farmers select the untrained ones, the total sample retained its random character.
The interviews were conducted in the farmers’ fields. This setting of the interview had several advantages:
■ the farmer and the enumerator walked to the field together which helped to create a relaxed atmosphere;
■ the interview could focus on the particular field that was visited, therefore sources for misunderstandings were reduced;
■ by seeing the enumerator’s interest in the field, the farmers responded more willingly.
Fields selected had to be both riceland and irrigated. Farmers normally only had one field that ful-filled these two criteria. If they had more, they were asked if any of the fields was next to a fishpond or whether there was a deep trench in one of the fields. If none of them did, then the field that was
105This is the only occasion where respondents could score negative values. In all other cases, scores are in the range between 0 and 1 to avoid implicit weighing of items. However, there had to be a ‘punishment’ for as-signing damage symptoms to beneficial organisms since this contradicts the fundamental principle of IPM.
In the previous item, identification of a beneficial organism as harmful did not lead to the subtraction of scores, thus double counting is avoided.
Table 8.1, continued
Indicator103 Score
Farmer correctly describes the damage symptoms of the identified insect pests + 0.25 points per correct of description;
-0.25 points if damage symptoms were assigned to beneficial organisms 105 Farmer states ‘resistance to pests’ as a reason for choosing a rice variety yes = 1 point
no = 0 points Farmer knows that pesticide applications are harmful yes = 1 point
to beneficial organisms in the field no = 0 points
Source: Own formulation.
easiest to reach was chosen.
A major part of the interviews dealt with farmers’ knowledge about harmful and beneficial insects.
It was felt that some visualization was necessary if the purpose was not only to find out how well the farmers had memorized the names of the insects. Therefore, each enumerator had a sample of five of the most common insects (ricebug, spider, ladybeetle, green leafhopper, damselfly) which were stored in little glass vials filled with alcohol. In addition, the pictures of insects which were either not avail-able or were too big to fit into the vials (the adult stemborer and the larva of the armyworm) were ob-tained from a booklet (IRRI 1983).
The questionnaire was translated into Kinaray-a, the local dialect and administered on a one-to-one basis (one-to-one enumerator, one-to-one farmer). It was pre-tested in two barangays in the municipality of Sibalom, after which final adjustments were made. Interviews took on average about two hours.