Assessment of a Practitioner-Derived Framework for Measuring Girl’s Agency in East Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID21308005
AuthorsAubryn Sidle (0000-0001-6770-5847), Brenda Oulo
Year2023
Volume67
Issue2
Pages331-352
Publication date2023-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative Education Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-4086 • E-ISSN: 1545-701X
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/724154
OpenAlexW4365139328
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited31

Although soft skills are considered important for quality education, there is little consensus on which skills matter for which populations and few cross-culturally validated measures. We propose a conceptual and methodological remedy to this quandary through an investigation of “agency” as an outcome measure for adolescent girls’ life skills programs. We engage community practitioners in East Africa to derive a four-dimensional structure of agency from theory, practitioner expertise, and empirical evidence. We develop and pilot this regional measure of agency for adolescent girls, utilizing confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the underlying structure of our instrument and to investigate its use as a pre-post measure. Analysis was conducted using data collected from 1,953 girls in four countries. Results indicate a four-latent factor structure representing the construct of agency. We argue that researchers should prioritize investigating the regional limits to validity of contextually specific soft skills measures over establishing universal metrics

Agency (philosophy) · Conceptual framework · Confirmatory factor analysis · Construct (python library) · Construct validity · Developmental psychology · Girl · Psychometrics · Social science · Sociology · Structural equation modeling · Computer Science · Early Childhood Education and Development · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Psychology · Youth Development and Social Support

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