Conceptualizing and Measuring Agency

Agency encompasses the awareness of options, ability to make informed choices, set goals, and take action to reach those goals. These choices, goals, and actions are informed and affected by internal and external resources such as resilience, social support, and social norms. 

While this process and the factors that influence it are highly contextual, concepts of agency in health and development are often defined by high-income nations and applied to low- and middle-income countries. This dynamic impedes conceptual clarity and development of reliable, validated measures to study agency across diverse contexts. This evidence gap also means that little evidence exists about the following:

  • Whether and how agency contributes to positive health and development impacts
  • How different forms of agency interact
  • Which strategies are most effective to foster agency

Agency for All is working to address these gaps across multiple fronts by exploring and discussing conceptualizations of agency in different communities around the world, examining existing measures of agency, and developing cross-nationally validated measures of agency informed by local conceptualizations.

Related Activities

Conceptualizing and Measuring Agency for SBC Programs

We are using a multi-pronged approach to understand what agency means to different people across various health areas and how agency affects health and well-being. Through consultation workshops, surveying experts, and a scoping review of peer-reviewed and gray literature, we are learning how context influences agency at the individual, interpersonal, and community levels. Please contact info@agency4all.org to download resource.

Developing a Measure of Contraceptive Acceptability

Family planning programs are evolving to prioritize reproductive empowerment, yet existing measures do not capture and track what motivates men and women to use a given contraceptive method, if at all. We are measuring contraceptive acceptability to better support reproductive agency. Please contact info@agency4all.org to download resource.