PROFESSIONALS’ INTENTION TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SHARING AGRICULTURAL KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

Agricultural information sharing has mostly been ruled by traditional media, for example, daily papers, TV, magazines and personal contact. In recent years, technology awareness and computer literacy are increasing across all demographics and various forms of social media are being used more and more by people looking for news, education, and other information including agriculture, health and so on. Social media is the mixing of innovation and social collaboration that makes an incentive in these kinds of media. Hence, agricultural extension agencies like Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) that use electronic media have a central role in facilitating the flow of a variety of information to offer the needed exposure of farmers to innovation for overall development. As a first step of that initiative, this study was designed to investigate extension workers, mostly extension level officers’ ranging from Upazila Agricultural Officer (UAO), Agricultural Extension Officer (AEO) to Sub-Assistant Agricultural Officer (SAAO), intention to use social media for sharing professional knowledge-based information among their networks. Data were collected in total from 126 professionals of five upazilas of Cumilla district using a structured interview schedule during 15 th February, 2018 to 25 viii

th February, 2018. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data in accordance with the objectives of the study. Based on the notion of the self-determination theory (SDT), this study proposed a theoretical conception considering both extrinsic and intrinsic motives and data were analyzed by SPSS v.23.0 to test the model significance. Five (5%) percent level of significance was used to test the significance level of each hypothesis. The findings revealed that majority of the respondents (96.8%) trust that powerful utilization of social media exceedingly helped them in expanding their own aptitude in their related activity field while just 3.2 percent said that utilizing of web-based social networking decently helped them in expanding their own expertise. The majority (96.8%) of the extension professionals proposed to keep proceed with the utilization of web-based social networking in agricultural information sharing. Finally, this study offered a number of theoretical and practical recommendations about the structuring of social media applications for agricultural extension service.