Refining the Conceptualization and Measurement of Women’s Empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa Using Data from the 2013 Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey

Pierre Pratley () and John Floyd Sandberg ()
Additional contact information
Pierre Pratley: The George Washington University
John Floyd Sandberg: The George Washington University

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2018, vol. 140, issue 2, No 14, 777-793

Abstract: Abstract The measurement of women’s empowerment has long eluded academics and practitioners alike. A key challenge relates to the way researchers construct measures of empowerment, pairing indicators together in either composite indices, or multiple dimensions. This study tests three commonly found measurement models of women’s empowerment using data from the 2013 Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey. Model fit statistics indicate that a seven factor first order Functional Scales of Empowerment model best fits the data. Implications following from this study’s findings include that simplification into composite indices, a commonly used method to aggregate indicators of empowerment may lead to erroneous conclusions regarding the effect of empowerment on development and health outcomes and hamper comparative research. The results from this study contribute to the highly important and often ignored discussion regarding measurement of women’s empowerment.

Keywords: Measurement; Women’s empowerment; Sub-Saharan Africa; Nigeria; Capability approach; Empirical validation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-017-1811-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:140:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s11205-017-1811-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-017-1811-1

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().