The Agency, Resources, and Institutional Structures for Sanitation-related Empowerment (ARISE) scales: Psychometric evaluation across eight cities in Asia and Africa

A well-established need exists for reliable and valid measures of empowerment across sectors, including in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). To address this need, we followed a multi-phased, theory-informed approach to develop the Agency, Resources, and Institutional Structures for Sanitation-related Empowerment (ARISE) scales, a set of 16 distinct yet inter-related scales, each of which measures a different sub-domain of women’s empowerment related to urban sanitation in low- and middle-income country settings. Here we present the third of three phases, which was focused on refining and further evaluating the ARISE scales. The objective of the current phase of work was to evaluate the reliability, validity, and measurement properties of the ARISE scales using cross-sectional data collected between August 2021 and June 2022 from a total of 5,586 women across eight cities in Asia and Africa: Meherpur (N = 720) and Saidpur (N = 730), Bangladesh; Narsapur (N = 721), Tiruchirappalli (N = 563), and Warangal (N = 704), India; Dakar, Senegal (N = 720); Kampala, Uganda (N = 713); and Lusaka, Zambia (N = 715). We evaluated the psychometric properties of the scales, including by using factor analytic methods to assess structural validity and measurement invariance across country settings and over time; calculating coefficients of internal consistency (composite reliability) and test-retest reliability; and using generalized linear regression, nonparametric Spearman rank correlations, t-tests, and ANOVA to test for construct, known groups, and criterion validity. We demonstrate that the ARISE scales can measure most sub-constructs of sanitation-related empowerment in a reliable and valid way, to generate data for better prioritization, design, implementation, and evaluation of strategies to improve women’s empowerment in the context of urban sanitation at the program and policy level. We also describe how these scales can contribute to our understanding of empowerment as a universal concept and process that can be quantitatively measured across contexts and populations using rigorous psychometric methods.