An Exploration Of Factors Associated With North Carolina Legislators Perception Of The North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service

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Download or read book An Exploratory Study of the Perceptions of Among North Carolina Cooperative Extension County Program Professionals about Integrated Programming written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT BOST, TERRI MICHELE. An Exploratory Study of the Perceptions of among North Carolina Cooperative Extension County Program Professionals about Integrated Programming. (Under the direction of Dr. R. Dale Safrit.) This exploratory descriptive-correlational research examined perceptions of North Carolina Cooperative Extension county program professionals towards integrated programming and explored possible relationships between professionalsâ€"!perceptions and selected personal and programmatic variables. The researcher used a census of North Carolina Cooperative Extension county program professionals employed as of September 1, 2009 (n = 482) and developed a web-based questionnaire, including two sections, based upon four research constructs identified from literature: 1. Collaboration, 2. Partnerships, 3. Discipline or Program Area, and 4. Issue-based Focus. Section I included eight items exploring each of the four constructs for a total of 32 items, using a Likert scale to measure respondentsâ€"!perceptions. Section II included eight items collecting data on respondentsâ€"!selected personal characteristics (i.e., gender, age, race/ethnicity) and programmatic variables (i.e., district, tenure, Extension title). The instrument was reviewed by an expert panel reviewed the instrument for face and content validity and pilot tested with a randomly selected group consisting of one agent from each of the three main Extension program areas (i.e., Agriculture and Natural Resources, Family and Consumer Sciences, and 4-H Youth Development), one area agent, and one County Extension Director from each of the six Extension districts, totaling 30 individuals. Data were collected for three weeks between October 5 and 26, 2009. A final response rate of 47.1% was achieved. Cronbachâ€"! alphas were calculated post facto for the four research constructs as measures of internal consistency, indicating reliability. The four resulting coefficients (.38 to .55) were lower than desir.