Measuring empowerment among adolescent girls in the context of intervention

Empowerment is an important goal in adolescent girl programming but remains elusive and unobserved from a quantitative measurement perspective. This brief describes a statistical exercise conducted to explore adolescent girl empowerment as a latent or underlying concept that, while not directly observed, may be illustrated through responses to questions on behaviors and attitudes asked in quantitative structured interviews. Data were used from a randomized controlled trial that demonstrated the impact in delaying girls’ age at marriage in rural Bangladeshi communities with a high prevalence of child marriage. The study collected extensive data on potential measures of voice, choice, and agency before and after the intervention from a representative sample of adolescents living in communities randomly allocated to three intervention arms and a control. The analysis comprises a series of steps to identify how empowerment may be measured and how three different interventions to offer different types of skills (support in math and English, gender rights awareness, and livelihoods training) affect those measures of empowerment