RATIONALE FOR SELECTING VARIABLES IN SOCIAL RESEARCH : A Statistical Perspective

An attempt has been made in this paper to show the statistical reasoning for the selection of variables in social reseach. Factor analysis which is one of the multivariate statistical methods has been used to select the variables in the study of adoption of farm technology. Seven predictor variables selected for the present study were found clustered in two factors which have been named tentatively as Elite and Progressiveness. These two factors can supply all the relevant information to explain the adoption phenomena