Survey-based Women Empowerment Index for Afghanistan (SWEI-A): An Explanatory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses

Abstract This study aimed to develop a country-specific index to measure women empowerment among married women aged 15–49 years in Afghanistan. The data from the 2015 Afghanistan demographic health survey (ADHS) was used to develop the index. The data on 26 variables across eight hypothesized domains related to women empowerment were used in EFA to probe the underlying domains in the data. CFA examined the structural validity of hypothesized factors in EFA. Four indicators were dropped during the analysis either due to the low and significantly different loading on one factor as compared to other indicators or due to overlap with other indicators loaded on different factors. The final model included 22 indicators across seven domains (labor force participation, attitude toward violence, decision-making, access to healthcare, literacy, age at critical life events, and property-owning) and had Cronbach’s alpha = 0.69; indicative of good internal reliability. The goodness-of-fit test represented an acceptable level of construct validity with the likelihood ratio, RMSEA, and SRMR values ≤ 0.05 and CFI and TLI > 0.95. The developed index shares a common ground for future research concerning women empowerment in Afghanistan and can enhance the comparability of the results across future studies. In addition, having a standard index for women empowerment at the individual and country level could help assess the progress and efforts that have been made to achieve gender equality (SDG 5), and guide the direction of future policies and interventions.