What Promising Quantitative Measures Can Assess Women’s Agency in Family Planning?
To assess these questions quantitatively, a growing body of evidence-based measures of gender equity and health speaks to a broad range of needs, constructs, and cultural contexts. GEH’s EMERGE platform is an open-access, one-stop shop where researchers and survey implementers can find and draw from over 300+ gender measures in the areas of health, politics, economics, and other social spheres, including family planning and household/family dynamics. In the coming months, we plan to launch a special webpage that focuses on gender measures in family planning. In the interim, we have selected a few measures of agency in family planning from our website that demonstrate strong measurement science and ease of use:
The EMERGE site includes additional details on the context and science of the measures, as well as their citations.
While there is much advancement on the science and validation of promising measures, we continue to face many gaps, requiring further research to improve our measures. For example, we often ask questions about contraceptives used, but not about contraception preferred or not preferred and reasons for this (Choice and Can). We assess family planning communication and decision-making but not negotiation, where women navigate compromise to achieve their family planning goals (Act and Resist). We assess barriers to family planning use, including reproductive coercion, but not the ways women are able to ensure they can have their needs met despite these barriers, such as via covert use (Resist). Certainly, beyond these issues, we need to ensure that the measures we have can be adapted and tested for use in more diverse contexts. To that end, more research is needed in the area of measurement science. For those interested in this line of inquiry, please review our guidance on measurement development.