Measuring empowerment in rural India using vignettes

Many development projects aim at empowering women. Yet, the measurement of empowerment has proved difficult and is riddled with technical and conceptual problems. Current approaches rely on long questionnaires and, to some extent, on subjective perceptions which are not comparable across groups. This article proposes a method for measuring empowerment based on vignettes and provides an application to a sample of rural women in Andhra Pradesh. The method is simple to administer and addresses biases in subjective perceptions. The empirical analysis shows how perceptions vary systematically across groups and how they can be corrected for. It is also shown how the impact of a project on empowerment can be tested. In this application, it is found that differences in self-reported empowerment are perceptual and that a self-help group intervention does not increase women empowerment.