respondents in each of the four villages against the dichotomous “extension officer contact” variable, to determine if the level of contact with the agricultural extension officers varied by village. Analytic strategy Ordered logit regression models and logit regression models were used to test the strength of each of the independent variables for predicting the dependent variables, and the Chi-Square test to examine the differences in level of contact with the agricultural extension office by village. Ordered logit regression models were used were used for the first dependent variable, “office visit,” since it is an ordinal variable, meaning it has ranked values, while logit regression models were used for the two dichotomous dependent variables “farm visit” and “extension officer contact.. Logit averages the coefficients for the independent variables across all possible cumulative logit so all of the information in the dependent ordered data gets used. The logit models, with odds ratio results, determine the odds of an increase in the dependent variable for every unit of increase of each of the independent variables. Chi-square analysis was used to test whether contact with the agricultural extension office (“extension officer contact”) is independent of residence in a particular village. All analysis was conducted using the STATA 11.2 statistical package. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the farmers’ opinions of the problems with the government agricultural schemes. Ethics and positionality Issues of power and positionality must be considered in this paper. One of the interns from McGill University, Malavika, was born in Tamil Nadu and raised in the Middle East, while the other McGill intern, Rebecca, and I were born in Canada. Malavika speaks Tamil and translated all of the interviews. As foreigners and guests,
we were treated with great hospitality and respect, and were in a position of power relative to many of the illiterate, poor farmers. Despite our assurance that households were not obligated to participate in our survey, they may have felt obliged to do so. Though the role of a researcher as insider or outsider should be considered a spectrum rather than a binary, we were on the outsider end of the spectrum (Valentine, 2002). Many of the respondents identified with Malavika through their common heritage; however Rebecca and I had few points of shared identity with the respondents, except for gender when interviewing female farmers. In several villages, locals asked us for financial assistance. Under such circumstances it is possible interview biased caused subjects altered their responses to be what they thought we wanted to hear, or to make us more likely to assist them. Had the interviewers been three Tamil men from AID India instead of three (mostly) foreign female students the results would likely have varied. Furthermore, from our own cultural upbringings and perspectives, we may have misinterpreted some responses and/or taken them out of context inadvertently. Jayaram Venkatesan, Director of Livelihoods at AID India, gave his permission for the data collected to be used for this paper. Ethics approval for secondary data analysis of the data collected by AID India was also received for this project through the McGill Research Ethics Board. Limitations
The main limitations in this study were the small sample size, the lack of nuance in quantitative analysis, the inability to examine the role of social networks and gender in this paper, and the lack of literature. The small sample size creates challenges for generalizing the results to FIELD NOTES | VOL II | 21