Dataset Information

Measurement properties of the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index.

ABSTRACT: Women's empowerment is a process that includes increases in intrinsic agency (power within); instrumental agency (power to); and collective agency (power with). We used baseline data from two studies-Targeting and Realigning Agriculture for Improved Nutrition (TRAIN) in Bangladesh and Building Resilience in Burkina Faso (BRB)-to assess the measurement properties of survey questions operationalizing selected dimensions of intrinsic, instrumental, and collective agency in the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agricultural Index (pro-WEAI). We applied unidimensional item-response models to question (item) sets to assess their measurement properties, and when possible, their cross-context measurement equivalence-a requirement of measures designed for cross-group comparisons. For intrinsic agency in the right to bodily integrity, measured with five attitudinal questions about intimate partner violence (IPV) against women, model assumptions of unidimensionality and local independence were met. Four items showed good model fit and measurement equivalence across TRAIN and BRB. For item sets designed to capture autonomy in income, intrinsic agency in livelihoods activities, and instrumental agency in: livelihoods activities, the sale or use of outputs, the use of income, and borrowing from financial services, model assumptions were not met, model fit was poor, and items generally were weakly related to the latent (unobserved) agency construct. For intrinsic and instrumental agency in livelihoods activities and for instrumental agency in the sale or use of outputs and in the use of income, items sets had similar precision along the latent-agency continuum, suggesting that similar item sets could be dropped without a loss of precision. IRT models for collective agency were not estimable because of low reported presence and membership in community groups. This analysis demonstrates the use of IRT methods to assess the measurement properties of item sets in pro-WEAI, and empowerment scales generally. Findings suggest that a shorter version of pro-WEAI can be developed that will improve its measurement properties. We recommend revisions to the pro-WEAI questionnaire and call for new measures of women's collective agency.

SUBMITTER: Yount KM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6876673 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Measurement properties of the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index.

Yount Kathryn M KM Cheong Yuk Fai YF Maxwell Lauren L Heckert Jessica J Martinez Elena M EM Seymour Gregory G

World development 20191201

Women's empowerment is a process that includes increases in intrinsic agency (power within); instrumental agency (power to); and collective agency (power with). We used baseline data from two studies-Targeting and Realigning Agriculture for Improved Nutrition (TRAIN) in Bangladesh and Building Resilience in Burkina Faso (BRB)-to assess the measurement properties of survey questions operationalizing selected dimensions of intrinsic, instrumental, and collective agency in the project-level Women's ...[more]

PMID: 31798204

Similar Datasets

Project description:The importance of women's roles for nutrition-sensitive agricultural projects is increasingly recognized, yet little is known about whether such projects improve women's empowerment and gender equality. We study the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) pilot project, which was implemented as a cluster-randomized controlled trial by the Government of Bangladesh. The project's treatment arms included agricultural training, nutrition behavior change communication (BCC), and gender sensitization trainings delivered to husbands and wives together - with these components combined additively, such that the impact of gender sensitization could be distinguished from that of agriculture and nutrition trainings. Empowerment was measured using the internationally-validated project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), and attitudes regarding gender roles were elicited from both men and women, to explore potentially gender-transformative impacts. Our study finds that ANGeL increased both women's and men's empowerment, raised the prevalence of households achieving gender parity, and led to small improvements in the gender attitudes of both women and men. We find significant increases in women's empowerment scores and empowerment status from all treatment arms but with no significant differences across these. We find no evidence of unintended impacts on workloads and inconclusive evidence around impacts on intimate partner violence. Our results also suggest some potential benefits of bundling nutrition and gender components with an agricultural development intervention; however, many of these benefits seem to be driven by bundling nutrition with agriculture. While we cannot assess the extent to which including men and women within the same treatment arms contributed to our results, it is plausible that the positive impacts of all treatment arms on women's empowerment outcomes may have arisen from implementation modalities that provided information to both husbands and wives when they were together. The role of engaging men and women jointly in interventions is a promising area for future research.

Project description:Background In 2017, a survey-based women's empowerment index (SWPER) was proposed for African countries, including three domains: social independence, decision making and attitude to violence. External validity and predictive value of the SWPER has been demonstrated in terms of coverage of maternal and child interventions and use of modern contraception. To determine its value for global monitoring, we explored the applicability of the SWPER in national health surveys from low- and middle- income countries (LMICs) in other world regions.MethodsWe used data from the latest Demographic and Health Survey for 62 LMICs since 2000. 14 pre-selected questions (items) were considered during the validation process. Content adaptations included the exclusion of women's working status and recategorization of the decision-making related items. We compared the loading patterns obtained from principal components analysis performed for each country separately with those obtained in a pooled data set with all countries combined. Country rankings based on the score of each SWPER domain were correlated with their rankings in the Gender Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Inequality Index (GII) for external validation.ResultsConsistency regarding item loadings for the three SWPER empowerment domains was observed for most countries. Correlations between the scores generated for each country and global score obtained from the combined data were 0.89 or higher for all countries. Correlations between the country rankings according to SWPER and GDI were, respectively, 0.74, 0.72 and 0.67 for social independence, decision-making, and attitude to violence domains. The correlations were equal to 0.81, 0.67, and 0.44, respectively, with GII.ConclusionsThe indicator we propose, named SWPER Global, is a suitable common measure of women's empowerment for LMICs, addressing the need for a single consistent survey-based indicator of women´s empowerment that allows for tracking of progress over time and across countries at the individual and country levels.

Dataset Information

Measurement properties of the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index.

Publications

Measurement properties of the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets