Abstract:
The intense competitive climate tightened the Sri Lankan insurers to make less profit and relentless market changes made lack of confidence on their future existence. Moreover, the Sri Lankans’ confrontational thoughts for insurance, unawareness were massive obstacles to lure new prospects, retain and maintain a favorable relationship with their existing customers. The insurance regulatory body reveals that the insurance industry penetration level was lower than 2% for a longer period. This upheld the Sri Lankan insurers have a considerable unexploited market space for their further growth in Sri Lanka. Therefore, the Sri Lankans’ attitudes and behaviors are vital factors for insurers to face this worst scenario. As an initiation, this study has been conducted to illustrate the socio demographic and economic factors impact on the attitudes of rural community which lead to improve the penetration on insurance from the grassroot level. To achieve this objective, the researcher used qualitative as well as quantitative methods to enrich the findings. The independent variables of this study consist of age, gender, marital status, education status, mode of employment, profession, income, numbers of earning members in the family, housing status, policy ownership and attitudes of rural community is used as the dependent variable of this study. The primary data has been gathered through a structured questionnaire and 20 in-depth interviews conducted with community members of Pambahinna area with secondary data. The sample size is restricted to 201 individuals to find out the influencing factors of the attitudes of rural community on insurance in the study area. For selecting sample out of population, random sampling technique is used and One-way ANOVA statistical technique is used to find out the impact of socio, demographic and economic factors on people’s attitudes towards insurance. The findings indicated that according to the age differences, marital status, number of income earners of a family, mode of employment, type of profession, income level, ownership of the house, policy ownership have statistically significant impact on Pambahinna rural community attitudes towards insurance. The results of the study expect to furnish information to the insurers to design and develop the products and make strategic marketing plans to win the customers in rural community.
