Agriculture Reference
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increase the chances of realizing the vision of a healthy village followed, with the
facilitators introducing an individual's health as an analogy. Once the participants
agreed on the value of self-assessment, focus group discussions were initiated to
discuss (1) what indicators (
ithimi
) are, (2) why indicators are useful, (3) which ones
would be most relevant for the particular village, (4) how empirical measurements
(
guthima
) would be carried out, and (5) how this information would be used.
Each group presented their conclusions to a joint forum, and further discussion
was encouraged. Disparities and points of agreement among groups were noted. Par-
ticipants were then asked to list those attributes that they felt were the most essential
elements of agroecosystem health. Pairwise scoring was used to rank attributes in
terms of importance. Focus groups were then reconstituted and each asked to list
potential indicators for the 10 most important health attributes identified. Communi-
ties were encouraged to consider both the practicality of measuring a given indicator
and its validity.
6.2.2 D
e v e l of p m e n t
o f
r
e s e A r C h e r
-p
r o p o s e D
i
in D i C A t of r s
The researcher-proposed indicators were based on the descriptions provided by the
communities through the participatory process, their stated goals and objectives,
and the attributes they considered to be most influential to agroecosystem health
and sustainability and depicted in cognitive maps. The initial list of potential
research-proposed indicators was arrived at using two different methods. In the first
method, lists of potential indicators were generated from the cognitive maps and
community goals. A potential indicator was a measure that would reflect an impor-
tant change in the potential of the system to meet a stated goal or one that reflects an
important change in a problem situation. An initial list of potential indicators was
generated combining all the goals and concerns from the six study sites.
The second method of generating potential indicators was through suggestions
by experts from various disciplines. In this process, the descriptions provided by the
communities through the participatory process as well as the initial list of potential
indicators derived from agroecosystem problems and goals was provided to a team
of experts consisting of social scientists, veterinarians, agriculturalists, engineers,
and medical professionals among others. The experts then proposed indicators that,
they felt, would provide important information in addition to that provided by vari-
ables in the initial list.
Indicators were selected from the list of potential indicators based on (1) valid-
ity, (2) feasibility, (3) parsimony, (4) timescales in which changes were reflected,
(5) holarchical scales at which measurements can be taken, and (6) ease of interpre-
tation.
Validity
was defined as how well a variable reflected changes of the attribute
it was intended to measure.
Feasibility
was defined as the practicality of measure-
ment (technical feasibility) and the cost (in terms of time and other resources) of
measuring a given variable (economic feasibility). The principle of parsimony was
included as a criterion because some variables provided information on more than
one attribute. For parsimony, some variables were excluded for the suite without
any significant loss in amount and quality of information supplied by the indicators.
Those variables that were not feasible to measure at the targeted holarchical scales
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