Care WE-MEASR tool
Posted by Share-Net NL on January 27, 2015 at 8:17 am
The Sexual, Reproductive and Maternal Health Team (SRMH) at CARE USA is pleased to share a multidimensional quantitative survey tool, theWE-MEASR (Women’s Empowerment- Multidimensional Evaluation of Agency, Social Capital & Relations). The WE-MEASR was designed for use with women and consists of 20 statistically reliable short scales and indices that measure women’s empowerment in domains critical to sexual, reproductive, and maternal health.
CARE designed the tool to strengthen and standardize the measurement of women’s empowerment in SRMH programming. Programs can utilize the entire set of WE-MEASR scales or select a sub-set of scales that measure the specific dimensions of empowerment that their program is designed to influence.
In developing the measures, CARE built on and adapted existing validated measures, including the Gender Equitable Men (GEM) scale, the Sexual Relationship Power Scale (SRPS), the Demographic and Health Survey Women’s Empowerment Modules and the World Bank Adapted Social Capital Assessment Tool (ASCAT).
The final measures were then field tested with 641 married women in Malawi in both patrilineal and matrilineal communities. The scales were then refined used exploratory factor analysis and reliability analysis. Several of the scales have also been tested and confirmed reliable in Kenya and Ethiopia. We welcome colleagues to adapt and test these scales for use in other contexts.
You may find the tool here:http://familyplanning.
Should you have any questions on the WE-MEASR, please contact SRMH Senior Advisor for Global Policy and Advocacy, Christina Wegs (cwegs@care.org)
