Sense of control and efficacy

Tools

• Agricultural Self-efficacy Scale
• Short-form Locus of Control Scale
• Generalized Livelihoods Self-efficacy Scale
• Collective Agency
• Cognitive Labor
• Time-use Agency

Overview

Increasing women’s sense of control over their lives is key to reducing gender inequalities and improving development outcomes (Wuepper and Lybbert 2017; Donald et al. 2020). Research suggests women tend to believe less in their abilities to act effectively towards their goals and they provide more importance than men to external factors determining their life events (Sherman, Higgs, and Williams 1997; Dercon, and Singh 2013). An individual’s sense of control over their life is also inexorably linked to the control over their time. However, gender inequalities in time allocations are pervasive. On average, women spend about three times as many hours as men on domestic and care work (United Nations 2020).

Understanding the degree to which women perceive control over their lives is critical for designing and adapting policies to change limiting local norms. This is particularly important given the proliferation of interventions that seek to transform gender norms through group-based discussions, community mobilization, or economic strategies (Abramsky et al. 2016; Ellsberg et al. 2015). Yet, more work is needed to know how to best capture women’s sense of control and ability over their economic lives, and how it relates to well-being outcomes (Edmonds, Feigenberg,and Leight 2020; McKelway 2021).

Social expectations about women’s unpaid care roles impose severe constraints on women’s well-being and livelihoods and are, thus, integrally linked to women’s agency. Yet, this linkage is not well defined in recent measures of women’s empowerment, which tend to incorporate time use only in terms of time poverty or having an excessive workload. While a focus on time poverty is useful and intuitive from a well-being perspective—a long workday decreases individual well-being, in terms of physical and mental fatigue—what time poverty reveals about agency is less clear (Eissler et al. 2021).

Women’s individual agency also depends on the power they derive from interacting and working with others to pursue shared goals. This important aspect of agency is commonly defined as “collective agency”. Existing measures are currently too difficult to scale up (owing to interview length), inadequately conceptualized, or conditional on membership in a group.

Listed above are links to tools MAGNET has developed for measuring sense of control and efficacy. 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.