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.
Description:
A thesis
Submitted to the Department of Agricultural Extension and Information System
Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN
AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION & INFORMATION SYSTEM