Ban, A.W., van den

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van den Ban, A.W.

NARCIS 

Extension research policy

Name not available

Wageningen Yield 

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Dr. A.W. van den Ban 
EXTENSION RESEARCH POLICY 
Helsinki, September 27, 1973 
I have been asked to speak about extension research 
policy and to focus on the manner and extent to which 
extension research should be included in a curriculum 
for extension education. The intention is that I will 
first give a general discussion of this topic based on 
my ten years as head of a department of extension 
education after which Roling will present some of our 
ideas on problem solving research based on a research 
project in which he has been involved for the past two 
years. 
In curriculum planning,we start with an analysis of the 
jobs our graduates are likely expected to take. We try 
to determine what capabilities they should have in order 
to fulfill these jobs properly. One finds university 
graduates, who studied extension education, in three 
kinds of jobs: 
1. Extension officers and administrators of extension 
organizations. Perhaps these two positions should be 
clearly distinguished, but at present this is not done 
at our university. 
2. Specialists in extension methods, who can give 
preeervice or ineervice training in extension methods 
and who can advise on the methods to be used in an 
extension program* 
3. Extension research workers, social scientists 
specialised on extension problems. 
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Let us look at the curriculum requirements for each 
type of job in turn, starting with the extension officers. 
They should, first of all, know what to teach. They need 
a thorough training in plant pathology, farm management 
or some suchlike subjects. Only in the second place 
do they, to my opinion, need a training in extension 
education. It is hard to say what should be included 
in such a small extension research project for three 
reasons: 
a. a basic objective of our extension training is to 
change the student from a message orientation to 
a client orientation. We believe that it is 
essential that the extension officers start with 
the felt need of the clients and with their view 
of the problem. This cannot be taught through 
books or lectures. A little can be done through 
laboratory training in discussion techniques, but 
interviewing farmers has often quite an impact on 
the students attitudes. My impression is that 
the farmers are more willing to discuss their views 
with a student who comes to Learn from them than 
with an extension officer of whom they expect that 
he comes to teach. 
b. An extension officer will have to cooperate with 
the extension research workers. He will have to 
read their reports and sociological studies of 
their clients. I believe that he will read these 
reports more critically if he has done some 
research himself. He will ask them to do research 
for sound program planning and for evaluation. 
Cooperation in research planning and interpretation 
will be more effective if the extension officer 
has some basic understanding of social research, 
an' understanding which he can gain in his own 
research project. 
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c. At this moment the Dutch extension officers.do very 
little extension research themselves, but one wonders 
whether their program planning and evaluation would 
not improve a good deal if they did some. Program 
planning is now based on a lot of statistical and 
farm management data on farms and hardly any 
information on the farmers, their knowledge and 
attitudes, their goals and plans for the future. 
A lot of people say that it is useful to evaluate 
an extension program, but very few do it. Should 
the normal extension officer have some training 
in research methods in order to do some of this 
research himself? 
In our Department there is no course in social science 
research methods. These courses are taught by capable 
people in the sociology departments, but few students 
who plan to become extension officers take these 
courses. They usually read a book on this subject and 
discuss their project with our staff. We do not have 
time to teach these courses ourselves and probably we 
would get difficulties with the sociology departments 
if we enter their field. Is this the right solution? 
There are plans at our university to switch from a 5 1/2 
year curriculum to a four year one. It is doubtful 
whether such a short curruculum will allow sufficient 
time for the studens, who plan to become extension 
officers, to do any extension research. Even in the 
present set-up some of our students only take courses 
and laboratory training, but don't get any experience 
in extension research. 
2, Let us now turn to the specialist in extension 
methods. In educating him* we give considerable time 
to laboratory training in different extension methods, 
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especially dialogue and group discussion. Extension 
officers experience this kind of training as quite 
helpful. In addition most of them also get some 
experience in extension research. I expect that 
the interest among these students for research experience 
will increase in the future, because the work of 
Rttling in Kenya shows that one can play a very useful 
role at the borderline between a specialist in extension 
methods and an extension research worker. In the past 
we have mainly worked with conclusion oriented research, 
for instance most of the diffusion research. This 
research has been helpful to understand how society 
is organized and why. However, this research has been 
only of limited help in attempts to change society. 
A typical illustration of most past research is that 
there are about 300 studies in which the adoption 
index has been correlated with the educational level 
of the farmer or other client, but as far as I know 
only two studies in which the effect of the educational 
level of the extension officer has been studied. This 
last kind of research might be more useful, because it 
is easier for an extension administrator to change the 
educational level of his own staff than to change the 
educational level of the farmers. What we need, in 
our opinion, is decision oriented research, which provides 
the extension officer with the information he needs to 
make sound decisions. This requires a close cooperation 
between the research worker and the extension officer in 
order to analyse which decisions have to be taken, among 
which alternatives we can choose to solve the problems of 
the extension officer and what are the consequences of 
each alternative. The assumption here is that extension 
officers are willing to make their decisions as systemati-
cally as possible and to be explicit on the political 
factors and values in their decision making. I will not 
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go more deeply in the nature of this problem solving 
or decision oriented research, because Roling can do 
this better. 
I believe that this kind of research can be of much 
help in improving the program planning of our extension 
service, but it might require that the extension 
officers themselves are trained in this way of thinking. 
3. And that brings us to our third category: the extension 
research worker. People who plan to make a career as 
full-time extension research workers usually have a 
social science background. They will hava done their 
courses in research methods in a department of sociology, 
psychology or andragology, but you cannot become a good 
research worker only by following courses and reading 
books on research methods. In addition, an apprenticeship 
is necessary, that is, doing research under the guidance 
of a more experienced research worker. Our problem is at 
present that the number of students interested in extension 
education is increasing so rapidly, that nearly all our 
time goes into teaching and the work in several committees. 
I think that, in a well organized department of extension 
education, the senior staff should have about a third of 
their time to do research in which some junior staff 
members can participate fulltime. We have not yet been 
very effective in our communication with the university 
administration to convince them of this point of view. 
I would be glad to hear from you how we can become more 
effective communicators in this important area. 
University graduate should not know a lot but be able to 
find new solutions for problems. Question for discussion 
Question for examination, evaluation criteria 
Evaluation courses: learn more from discussion than from 
lecturing,organization better than diffusion. 


Extension research policy

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