Developing a Guttman scale for measuring the degree of empowerment of rural women

Women, the reservoir of productive human resource constitutes almost half per cent of the countryu0027s total population. India has been working towards empowering her women ever since independence, and especially since the 1990s. There is no single indicator to measure how far women have come, and how much more women still have yet to go to achieve gender equality. Understanding the different dimensions of womenu0027s empowerment is important to develop policies that will enhance gender equality and begin the shifts in cultural norms to promote womenu0027s rights. Considering these facts, a scale was developed to measure the level of empowerment of rural women by using Guttman scale method. The present study was conducted in six blocks of two districts in Tamil Nadu state with a sample size of 100 rural women for the purpose of this study, a variable was operationalized to measure the level of empowerment of rural women in varying degees favourableness or unfavourableness. A total number of 53 indicators were finally selected and arranged randomly under 12 dimensions in the scale. A two point response of agree and disagree were used as response categories. The co-efficient of reproducibility for each dimension was worked and overall co-efficient of reproducibility was found to be 0.981. Hence it can be accepted as very good scalogram. Language: en