Asset Control and Benefits Scale

The Measures for Advancing Gender Equality (MAGNET) initiative aims to broaden and deepen the measurement of women’s agency, based on the development of new tools and rigorous testing and comparison of both new and existing methods for measuring agency, and promoting the adoption of these measures at scale. By increasing the availability of innovative meaningful measures of agency for a broad range of contexts, we hope our work will lead to an improved understanding of what women’s agency is, how it manifests and how it can best be measured across contexts given the research question at hand. There are myriad definitions of ownership, control, benefit, and use of assets (e.g., right to access the resource, exploit for economic benefit, right to transfer, right to bequeath, etc.,). A common challenge in survey implementation is the significant cost, both in terms of duration and budget, that collecting a full roster of assets and asset rights might involve. The Asset Control and Benefits Scale aims to simplify the process by measuring with Likert-agreement items the construct of control and benefits over assets including land, livestock, phone, mode of transportation, and large household appliances. This scale is suited for surveys run by NSOs, other nationally representative individual- or household-level surveys, and for targeted thematic or impact evaluation surveys designed to understand individuals' agency and decision-making. This data study includes following files. 1. A survey document (including implementation guidelines). 2. Two files, CAPI_Choices and CAPI_Survey, along with the accompanying help files, can be used to construct a CAPI program ready for survey implementation. Alternatively, users can use an Excel workbook "CAPI_.xlsx" that includes worksheets for survey and choices, along with others, for constructing a CAPI program ready for survey implementation.