Measurement of Attitude and Behavior of Self-Help Group Members: Evaluative Study of Eastern India

Abstract

Emerging challenges in livelihood security necessitate group action; hence, building social capital is the critical in reducing rural poverty in India. Self-help groups (SHGs) have emerged as an effective mechanism of empowerment as well as being an efficient mode of technology dissemination. Therefore, a study was undertaken to measure the attitude and behavior constructs of SHG member. A Likert-type scale developed by Meena et al. (2008) was applied to measure the attitude construct. However, behavior construct was developed consisted of 30-items, for which Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of reliability was observed as 0.80. Data were solicited from one-hundred randomly selected SHG members of Patna district of Bihar state, India. Study reveals that most of the SHG members were male (53%), aged from 27 to 47 years, had rural background (94%), experienced less than 6 year in SHG (61%), adopted agriculture as prime occupation (61%), educated up to primary level (51%) with low income. A significant change in the attitude of SHG members was observed in the areas viz., socio-economic upliftment, educational and training, marketing and entrepreneurship qualities, technology adoption and participatory research, and credit aspect. Overall, 91% SHG members had a favorable attitude; however 62% SHG members moderately changed in their behavior. The independent variables i.e., age and education had positive and significant correlation with the behavior construct. Henceforth, for addressing the issues of rural poverty, enrichment of the system with social capital through empowerment and formation SHGs; provision of financial and credit support; creation of market-driven and decentralized extension system; use of media-mix for technology transfer, informal education at rural level; conduction of need-based capacity building programmes and strong political will need to be emphasized