Factors Influencing Rice Grower Women's Use of Information Sources: A Case Study of Mazandaran Province

Considering the low participation of rural women in extension-education programs, in order to transfer information to this social group, agricultural extension organizations have no choice but to identify the information sources used by them. Therefore, this research, which was conducted in 2011-2012 cropping season, aims at identifying the influencing factors on the use of information sources among rural women in Mazandaran province. For this purpose, using multistage cluster sampling method, 300 rural women from this province were selected to involve in the research process. Results from the descriptive statistics show that spouse, household members, and other women in the village are the most important sources of information for the rural women. In addition, results from the analytic statistics proves the statistically significant correlation between some of the individual and professional characteristics of rural women and their use of the information sources. Furthermore, results from the multiple regression analysis show that 68 percent of the variance of the dependent variable is explained by the identified independent variables.