Social Sciences and Humanities Open (Jan 2023)
Extracting epidemiological knowledge of shrimp farmers applying participatory appraisal tools and mobile phone-assisted survey to identify and solve the problems of WSD
Abstract
Participatory epidemiologists have emphasized that farmers have rich and detailed knowledge about the diseases of the animals they rear and the risk factors responsible for the diseases. Based on this conception a step-wise method where collegial participation of researchers and farmers was followed to gather qualitative and quantitative information to identify the possible risk factors of white spot disease (WSD) of shrimp. This proposed method consists of two phases: participatory phase that includes sampling of relevant farmers and identifying possible risk factors; and conducting survey and data analysis phase that includes mobile phone-assisted survey and statistical analysis. The advantages compared to traditional survey methods are that this method: i) brings researchers and shrimp farmers together in a participatory platform in identifying various risk factors associated with WSD, which is not possible by researcher-only surveys; ii) feeds the data of risk factors/variables to the mobile-phone assisted survey, in order to enhance the data quality through direct participation by the farmers and using mobile phones for data entry; and iii) supports multivariate statistical analysis, which is highly effective in identifying the relationships between potential risk factors and WSD in shrimp. Farm operator, the type of fertilizer used, water source (direct natural), presence or absence of a reservoir, and frequency of water exchange were the significant variables/risk factors found from the multivariate analysis most likely to be associated with WSD prevalence. Analysis of the collected data reveals that the major constraining variables identified by this participatory study were related to water management measures. Therefore, the WSD affected shrimp farmers do not need any expensive inputs from outside their communities but can solve the problem of WSD participatory manner with other stakeholders. A participatory model, as we proposed based on the results indicates that, DoF as the key stakeholder can play a leading role for organizing cluster of farmers and identify other stakeholders to solve the problems of WSD.
