Analysis of ranking exercises in Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): a case study from the smallholder rubber sector

Rubber Research Institute of Sri Lanka (RRISL) is an organization, which caters to both smallholder and the estate sectors by means of developing appropriate technologies to increase productivity of the rubber sector. Low adoption rates were evident for many recommended technologies, especially in the smallholder sector, since their perceptions are not always taken into account in recommendation of technologies. As a result, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) has gained a considerable interest among the researchers recently, especially when dealing with smallholder rubber farmers. Thus, it is vital to introduce statistical concepts into PRA, which is an area where statistical applications are very rare. Therefore, many participatory studies report only data summaries as results. This paper addresses this issue and illustrations are presented based on participatory studies carried out with smallholder rubber farmers. The paper is focused on analysis of commonly used participatory tools; pair-wise ranking and matrix ranking, using appropriate statistical techniques.

Key words: non-parametric tests; Participatory Rural Appraisal; rubber; smallholders

DOI: 10.4038/jrrisl.v87i0.1809

Journal of the Rubber Research Institute of Sri Lanka, (2005) 87, 7-14