Description:

Multiple measures of women’s empowerment are currently in use as practitioners continue to refine and adapt how we approach quantitative and qualitative measurement of a psychosocial construct to inform program implementation. Self-efficacy, or a belief in one’s ability to perform a given task, is one aspect of empowerment that is routinely measured with the General Self-Efficacy Scale, which has been validated in various contexts as an effective measure and is included in the Project-Level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI). However, some users of the General Self-Efficacy Scale have noted comprehension challenges by respondents, even after careful translation to contextualize content. These experiences call into question whether measuring psychosocial constructs with tools designed from an outsider perspective fully captures dimensions of women’s empowerment. In this Side Event, we take a deep dive into how we approach measuring self-efficacy, present results from using both outsider and insider tools, and facilitate participant discussions regarding experiences measuring self-efficacy, exploring what we may be missing by not including contextually-defined measures of women’s empowerment. At the end of the discussion, we aim to have a jointly produced list of recommendations to help practitioners decide when to use different approaches.

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