Development and Psychometrics of an Instrument for Determination of Knowledge and Practice of Pistachio Farmers about the Safety of Pistachio Pesticides

Assessing the knowledge and practice of farmers with valid questionnaires is necessary to design appropriate educational interventions to reduce the use of pesticides in agriculture. Evaluating the knowledge and practice of individuals is a fundamental principle to design appropriate educational interventions to prevent pesticide production on pistachio products. Consequently, this study was carried out for designing and validating a questionnaire to determine the knowledge and practice of the farmers on the complications, keeping, transportation and disposal of pesticides. In this study, pursuant to view of experts, farmers and review of studies, a questionnaire was designed. Then, the face validity of questionnaire was determined with opinion of farmers. The Content Validity Ratio (CVR) and Content Validity Index (CVI) of the items of the questionnaire were evaluated through perspectives of experts’ panel. The stability test of the questionnaire by test-retest analysis. The outcomes demonstrated that CVI and CVR of questionnaire’s items were ≥0.79 and ≥0.62 respectively. Finally, the questionnaire was contained 39 items in knowledge and 22 items in practice. The results of Pearson correlation coefficient indicated that knowledge (p< 0.0001, r =1) and practice (p < 0.0001, r = 0.99) had acceptable reliability. This questionnaire can be used to measure the knowledge and practice of farmers about complications, keeping, transportation and disposal of pesticides and educational interventions.