| dc.description.abstract | Empowerment of rural communities around the public forest can be done as one of alternative in order to improve the quality of human resources in rural communities. Forestry counselor plays an important role in disseminating information to the forest farmer community for a better change. The more credible a counselor, then the possible occurrence of change will be better. The purpose of this study was to assess the farmer’s perceptions about the credibility of forest counselor as the sources of information agents about forest management and toassess the factors that affect farmers perceptions about the credibility of forestry counselor based on the Spearman correlation test method. The research was conducted in Distric Rao, Pasaman, West Sumatra Province in August 2010. The materials used in this study was questionnaire. The instrument used was calculators, stationery, cameras, PC with the software SPSS 17 and Microsoft Excel. This study uses regression analysis and correlation analysis by taking a census respondents from 67 members from the forest farmer groups. Based on the research, the relationship between characteristics of forest farmers with farmer's perception to the credibility of forestry counselor can be found with the equation : Y1 = 85,448 to 0.90 X1 +1.624 X2 - 0.29 X3 + 2.600E- 7X4, Y2 = 27.047 to 0.077 X1 + 0.17 X2 - 0.48 X3 + X4 2.885E-8, and Y3 = 20.277-.040 X1 + .174 X2 - .067 X3 + X4 5.584E-8, where Y as Forest farmers perceptions on the credibility of forestry counselor, X1 as an age, X2 as an education level, X3 as the length of joining in forest farmer group and X4 as an income of group members. Based on these equations, we can see that the relationship between characteristics of forest farmers (age, education and the length of joining in forest farmer group) have a fairly strong relationship with perceptions about the credibility of forestry counselor. Forest farmers have a perception that forestry counselor is plenty enough on fulfilling its role, has a good communication and trustworthy as a forestry counselor agents. The number of interactions between forest farmers with forestry counselor workers either formally or informally has significantly affect farmers' perceptions of the credibility of forestry counselor. | en |
