Goal-setting and decision-making

Tools

• Goal-setting Capacity Scale
• Preferences over Decision-making
• Resistance and Backlash 
• Intra-personal Conflict Strategies
• Bandwidth Depletion 
• Unpacking Joint Decision-making
• Algorithmic Assessment of Agency
• Motivational Autonomy and Internalized Norms
• Gender and Occupation: Automatic Cognition Test
• Valuation of Time and Money
• Gender Inequality: Critical Consciousness Scale

Overview

Listed above are links to tools MAGNET has developed for measuring goal-setting and decision-making. For each tool, we provide the motivation behind the tool, a sample portion of the survey, and measurement properties from contexts where the tool has been tested. Additionally, the full survey, a statistical annex with more detailed validation data, and Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI) files, can be obtained by following the IFPRI Dataverse link near the top of each tool page.

Improving women’s agency is crucial for advancing gender equality. Less than half of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia participate in making decisions over their own health care, major household purchases and visiting their families. Improving women’s intra-household bargaining power has also been shown to benefit economic development: women making decisions is linked to greater investments in female goods and wellbeing, as well as nutrition and human capital for children (Duflo 2003; Ashraf, Karlan, and Yin 2010; Hou and Ma 2011; Doss 2013; Armand et al. 2020). In addition to strengthening women’s decision-making power, another priority for gender equality is ensuring that women can enact well-defined goals that stem from their own values and preferences. Existing evidence shows that women face constraints in setting concrete goals and strategies for achieving them (e.g., Johnson 2015), and their motivation is less likely to stem from intrinsic goals compared to men (e.g., Vaz, Pratley, and Alkire 2016).

Improving women’s ability to define goals and act on them is an important— and urgent—policy goal. Yet our understanding of how to achieve this goal is hampered by the lack of adequate measurement tools and recognized best practices. First, existing measures of women’s agency tend to have a narrow focus: standard survey questions do not capture the nuances of intra-household relationships or the constraints women face in defining and realizing their preferences—or how they relate to existing norms. Without knowing the different sources of and motivation for preferences, we are failing to measure agency in a way that is grounded in women’s values. And, even when measures capturing these broader dimensions of women’s goal setting and decision-making do exist, they are often not validated in lower-income country contexts or adapted to the realities of women’s lives in these settings. This results in a fragmented understanding of women’s agency, restricting the design of quality interventions and the evaluation of their impact. Research is needed to broaden and deepen the measurement of women’s goal-setting and decision-making, both within and outside the household.