Interviews with 940 Iowa farm operators and their wives were conducted during 1977 to address the question of perceived extension effectiveness (the degree to which the respondent perceived the Cooperative Extension Service as meeting his/her needs). Two models of organizational effectiveness were advanced and suggested as being consistent with efforts to use the perceptions of actual and/or potential client groups as a method for determining effectiveness. Based upon an analysis of the perception, it became clear that extension was not suffering an "image crises" in that there was a rather consistent positive rating given across all items. While several variables such as fatalism, social participation, media usage, and extension contact were related to perceived effectiveness at a statistically significant level, the magnitude of the associations were not large. Other key variables, such as age, education, farm size, and cosmopolitanism were found not to be related to perceived effectiveness. Data tended to demonstrate that the independent variables selected were more consistently related to extension contact than to perceived effectiveness, although even these relationships were not particularly strong. The finding of little or no relationship has important implications for extension in the sense that there does not appear to be a clearly identifiable group that harbors a collective negative perception of extension effectiveness. (Author/NEC)