Social Influence in Using ICT among Fishermen in Malaysia

Abstract

One of the main factors that changes individuals' behavior is social influence. Social influence is defined as a change in an individual's thinking, feelings, attitudes, or behavior that results from interaction with other individuals or groups. Within the scope of ICT adoption among fishermen, social influence is expected to spread, and this study attempts to discover the social influence that impinges on fishermen's use of ICT in their fishing routine. This is a quantitative study in which a total of 400 respondents have been selected based on multi-stage simple random sampling. SPSS is used to gain the required analyses, and descriptive analysis is also performed. The results reveal that social influence has less impact on fishermen's use of ICT based on the low level of mean scores recorded for each of the eight statements studied.

Readiness of Young Malaysian Fishermen to Use Global Positioning System within the Fishing Operation

“…The mean score recorded for days spent at the sea for fishing operation per month was 18.7 days and to have such number is not surprising as one of the requirements for being a registered fisherman was to conduct at least 120 days of fishing operation in a year. In line with findings of other studies Mazuki et al, 2013;Bolong et al, 2012), a majority of the respondents of this study were coastal fishermen (86.3%).…”

“…The mean score for age was 31.3 years where a majority of them were included in the age group of 36-40 years old. Fisheries industry seem fail to attract involvement from higher education achiever Bolong et al, 2013;Shaffril et al, 2013) and a similar secanario can be found within the scope of this study where only 4.5% of the respondents possessed tertiary level of education and slightly more than one third of them (34.6%) possessed SPM/MCE/SPMV level of education. Man (2008) have explained the scenario by stating that higher education achiever seem to express less interest on agriculture activities as they consider it as a second class job or just an alternative way of adding their income.…”

“…It is understood that financial constraint might obstrcut the related agencies from hiring more officers and it is recommended here that influential members of the community to be hired as the informal officers from the agencies that can voluntarily run the extension works. Any extension works regarding technology usage run by local members can be successful based on the fact that higher involvement from fishermen are expected if a program is run by local people and influential people such as fishermen colleagues, jetty leaders and skippers Mazuki et al, 2013).…”

“…Zone A and Zone B fishermen are also known as coastal fishermen while Zone C0 and C2 fishermen are also known as deep sea fishermen. A majority of fishermen in Malaysia is among the senior fishermen and up to date there is no recent statistic on the number of young fishermen in Malaysia, however, local studies done by Omar et al (2012), Shaffril et al (2013) and Mazuki et al (2013) have consistently shown that nearly 30% of fishermen within their studies are young fishermen.…”

“…Global Positioning System or known as GPS is an advanced tool that offers superior functions which overcome several problems associated with conservative ways of catching fish. Though there are abundance of study aim on fisheries technology usage among the fishermen Ghee-Thean, 2012;Bolong et al, 2013;Mazuki et al, 2013), not much interest has been placed on their readiness to use advanced technology and the present study aims to fill the gap.…”