Short-form Locus of Control Scale

Measures for Advancing Gender Equality (MAGNET) Initiative. 2024. Short-form Locus of Control Scale. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) [dataset]. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IDCTVE. Harvard Dataverse. Version 2.

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.

Measuring an individual’s agency requires understanding to what degree individuals believe they can purposefully achieve their goals (Kabeer 1999; Donald et al. 2020). A common conceptualization in psychology is an individual’s locus of control (Rotter 1966): the degree to which an individual believes that events are caused by one’s own behavior versus external factors (chance or powerful others). This construct is of policy interest because a greater internal locus of control is empirically associated with positive outcomes including human capital, technology adoption, employment outcomes, and savings. The 9-item Short-form Locus of Control Scale adapts the Sapp and Harrod (1993) scale, allowing us to capture who are the “powerful others” that individuals have in mind when we try to measure individuals’ external locus of control. This scale includes items that explicitly mention household and non-household members.

This scale can be used to measure differences in internal locus of control within a population, determine where an individual’s feeling of lack of control comes from, or to assess heterogeneity in the impact of a program by baseline levels of locus of control. Which “powerful others” are included in the scale can be adapted depending on the context. For example, when administering this scale to adolescent girls, asking about parents or peers may be more relevant. This tool 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 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.