Communication for development programmes: an information integration analytic study of communicator effectiveness

Abstract

Development programmes are instruments of public-policy and are created specifically to translate policy objectives to actual outcomes. The incidence of imperfect correspondence between the two is referred to as "implementation failure" in literature on public policy studies. Peoples’ participation has been identified as an important variable explaining implementation failure of development programmes. Ideal typically, people’ participation refers to cooperative partnership between the development programme organisation and the people for whom the former is created. Creation of greater awareness among the people, apart from other things, is premised as a necessary condition for people to evolve from historically being passive recipients to a state of being cooperative partners in the development process. The role of persuasive communication in this direction could hardly be overemphasized. The rural environment of most development programmes restricts the options in choosing effective communication strategy.Though graphic materials are also used, verbal communication. Through interpersonal and person—group contacts, constitutes the mainstay of communication processes employed. This piece of research addresses itself to the issue of communicator's effectiveness. Communicator’s effectiveness is equated with the extent to which recipients Judge his/her statement to be acceptable. The Judgment of acceptability is conceptualized as an outcome of combining information—cues on two attributes of the communicator; -his/her similarity with the recipients and his/her expertise on the substantive topic of development action. The problem is posed in the framework of information integration theory. An averaging model is hypothesized in the process of combining information on these two attributes of the communicator. Field experimental design is used to collect data. The District Rehabilitation Centre (DRC) scheme is used as the context. Fifteen communicator descriptions are used. Six of them are one—cue and rest nine are two—cue descriptions. Three statements are used separately on behalf of every purported communicator. In the choice and operationalisation of both, the communicator descriptions and statements, real situations of the DRC Scheme are used. Sixty individuals from village Athantar of Belipatana block under DRC, Puri, cooperated as respondents in the study. These individuals belonged to three social groups of the village in equal numbers. Support for the hypothesis is found in the results of data analysis. Some of the significant findings of the study are the following: 1. Respondents across all social and economic groups use an averaging-type rule in combining information-cues on the two attributes of the communicator. 2. Expertise factor seems to be given higher weight age by the recipients in forming opinion about extent of acceptability. 3. Maximum acceptability for statements are observed for communicator description of level 'high’ of expertise corresponding to the attribute of the District Rehabilitation Officer. 4. At least six two—cue communicator descriptions are found to be higher on reported acceptability than the descriptions used to denote the attributes of the Village Rehabilitation Worker who currently acts as the communicator for the programme. Based on these findings, implications for programme design and communication strategy are discussed. Further research needs and usefulness of the present methodology in similar and related substantive fields are suggested.