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

Abstract

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.