Abstract

The main objective of the current paper is to investigate the effective factors on the farmers' trust in trainers using structural equation modeling. the current paper is an applied one and it is also a descriptive-survey research regarding the data gathering methods. It is a correlative study and particularly it is based on structural equation modeling. the statistical population of the study includes all the farmers, gardeners, and poultry and livestock farmers (traditional and industrial) residing in Ilam Province which adds up to 58858 people. The sampling method is multi-step random sampling method and in order to calculate the size of the sample, the maximum variance and Morgan's table were used and determined the size to be 384 participants. in order to evaluate the validity of the questionnaire, context validity method was used and the questionnaire was confirmed by ten experts. In order to evaluate the stability the Cronbach's Alpha Coefficient was calculated to be 0.8824. the results of the study show that there is a positive significant relationship among the characteristics of the trusting party (farmers), the characteristics of the trusted party (trainers) and the environmental characteristics with the farmers' trust in trainers and all the three hypotheses of the study were confirmed. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.