Aletheia Donald presented four new scales from the forthcoming MAGNET paper “Measuring Psychological Constructs in Low-Income Settings” (co-authored with Clare Clingain and Maria Hernandez-de-Benito) at the IPA-Northwestern Methods & Measurement Conference on October 12th. At the conference, researchers from around the world discussed recent advances in measurement under IPA’s Research Methods Initiative’s three strands: Research Design and Analysis, Fieldwork Implementation and Data Collection, and Questionnaire Design and Measurement.
Though psychological constructs are core to intrinsic agency and important for tracking progress on women’s empowerment and development goals, they are primarily developed and tested in Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) contexts. To fill this gap, each of the four new scales was piloted in at least 3 lower-income contexts, from Malawi to Uganda. The first new scale is a Goal-Setting Capacity scale, capturing individuals’ ability to create goals, how clear the goals they set are, and how important they perceive goal-setting to be. The second is a Generalized Efficacy Livelihoods scale, aimed at measuring self-efficacy applicable to general economic activities, while the third is an Agricultural Self-Efficacy scale aimed at capturing relevant constraints for farmers related to planting, harvesting, labor and market engagement. The fourth is a new Locus of Control scale, which adapts a previous short-form scale only tested in high-income settings and aims to distinguish which ‘powerful others’ dictate the respondents’ life within the external locus subscale (e.g., household members vs community members).
International Food Policy Research Institute