USE OF HANDHELD COMMUNICATION MEDIA BY THE FARMERS FOR INFORMATION ACCESS FOR THE SELECTED AREAS OF NILPHAMARI DISTRICT

Abstract

The key concern of this study was to explore the extent of handheld communication media use by the farmers. Three unions of Nilphamari upazila under Nilphamari district were randomly selected as the locale of the study. 117 farmers were selected as the sample for this study. Data for this study were collected through personal interview by the researcher herself during July 31 to August 31, 2019. Dara were analyzed by Multiple Regression Analysis using SPSS 23.0. Age, Education, ICT experience, ICT ownership, ICT self-efficacy, perceived usefulness were the selected variables for the study. An overwhelming majority (45.30%) of the respondents was middle aged, 49.3% of the respondents had secondary education. Among the farmers, 80 respondents had self-access to feature phone and 69 respondents had selfaccess to smart phone. Around half of the respondents (49.57%) had full access

to the Internet while one-fifth of the respondents (22.22%) had no access to the

Internet.

Furthermore, 95.73% farmers used mobile phone on daily basis. Considering the inferential statistics, age, education, ICT ownership and perceived usefulness had positive and significant contribution to the extent of handheld communication media use which constitutes 68.7% (R = 0.687) of the variance. This study also noticed that respondents’ handheld communication device use experience and self-efficacy had also positive contribution (at 10% level of significance). Thus, the study concludes with the recommendation to enable favorable environment to promote handheld communication devices in receiving agricultural information.