Factors Related to the Well-being of Farmer Housewives and Families in Accordance with the Sufficiency Economic Approach in Chiang Mai Province

Abstract

The purposes of this research were to study 1) basic socio-economic of farming housewives and families in Chiang Mai province 2) factors related to the well-being of farmer housewife’s and families in accordance with the Sufficiency Economy approach. The sample size of 375 farmer housewives was obtained by multi-stage random sampling. A set of questionnaire was used for data collection in opened-ended question and closed-ended question. Multiple regressions were used to analyze the relationship between dependent variable and independent variables. The results of the research found that the farmer housewives had average age of 47.71 years old. Most of both housewives and their husbands were elementary school graduates. Majority had 4 members of family. They had 2 children and 2 agricultural workforces on average. Their time span of marriage was 24.04 years on average. They had an average monthly income of 3,948.27 baht and the family income was less than 10,000 baht. Most of the informants had never left their villages to new settlement. They were members of the village fund and the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives. With regards to economic role of the respondents, as a whole, it was found that they had a high level in household economy. Overall, most of them obtained the agricultural knowledge at moderate level and source of the agricultural knowledge was television.

It was found that the significant factors contributing to well-being of families at 0.05 levels or lower were 1) number of children 2) the economic roles of the farmer housewife 3) the agricultural activities in accordance with sufficiency economy approach, and 4) the problems and constraints of agricultural activities. The important problems were the higher price of inputs, shortage of farm labor, and crops damaged by insects and pests.