Browsing by Author "Upananda, V."

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Farmers’ Perceptions of Climate Change on Sri Lankan Agriculture: Case Study of Kurunegala District
(4th International Conference on Social Sciences 2018, Research Centre for Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Upananda, V.; Norbert, S.A.
Farmers are accustomed to cope with year-to-year changes in the climate but climate change is expected to accelerate the need and magnitude of farmers’ adaptation. Based on a survey of farmers in Kurunegala District (89 responses), this paper assesses how farmers perceive climate change, and how they adapted strategies as this directly affected their livelihood. Interquartile Range and median were used to measure the perceptions and multiple response model was adopted to understand the adaptation strategies of farmers. The small interquartile range proved that respondents’ opinions are highly consensus on farmers’ perceptions on climate change. Further, all respondents, which were 76, agreed with the fact that there is an increase in temperature, supported by the trend analysis. Farmers appear to be well aware of climate change and only 1.2% of farmers seemed not to have actively undertake adaptation measures to counteract climate change. Indeed, almost 98% undertook some kind of remedial action. The adaptation options observed in the study area are diverse but the main adaptation strategies of farmers including planting short season variety and changing crop planting dates were identified
The Impact of Out-of-Pocket Expenditure of Diabetic Patients on Household Consumption: A Case Study in Kurunegala Teaching Hospital
(Research Centre for Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Upananda, V.; Amirthalingam
According to the World Health Organization, diabetes is a chronic disease that requires medical treatment and care for a prolonged time. Despite the existence of free healthcare system in the country, patients are compelled to bear the cost of medication and related expenditure for a considerable period of time, perhaps throughout the lifetime. Therefore, the financial burden of diabetes may have a significant impact on household expenditure. Then the question emerging from this problematic situation, ‘whether Out of Pocket Expenditure (OPE) for treating and caring diabetes has an impact on household consumption’. Since diabetic population in Sri Lanka is nearly four million, findings of this study may useful to identify the attributes of OPE for diabetes of this larger population. Therefore, this study is based on Kurunegala teaching hospital. The major data collecting instrument was by a questionnaire developed, after translating cost concepts into questions which are pre-tested to understand whether respondents clearly understand the questions targeted to collect data and data were collected from a sample of 50 patients attended to the Diabetes clinic of the hospital. Due to time constraint, convenience sampling method was applied to collect data from patients in the diabetes clinic of January 2016. Data were analyzed using SPSS. Simple linear regression was calculated to predict the impact of OPE on household consumption (F1,48 ) = 1.643 p < .206 ) with R2 of .033. These results suggest that the impact of OPE on household consumption is not significant. The results of this study also suggests that treatments for diabetic patients by state hospitals are satisfactory and out of pocket expenditure for diabetic treatment has no significant effect on household consumption.