The SWPER Global was developed using similar methods to what was done for the SWPER for Africa. In that case, we used 15 items available in DHS surveys (see Table 2): five items related to the woman’s opinion on whether a husband beating his wife is justified in specific situations (wife goes out without telling husband; wife neglects the children; wife argues with the husband; wife refuses to have sex with the husband; and if she burns the food), frequency of reading newspaper or magazine, her education in completed years of schooling, age at first birth and at first cohabitation, age and education difference between the woman and her husband, three questions on the woman’s participation in decisions about seeking health care for herself, large household purchases and visits to family and relatives, and whether the woman worked in the last year. Except for the items related to age and education that are continuous, all other items are ordinal with higher scores given to categories considered of higher empowerment level (the codes are provided in Table 2). The scores were derived through principal components analyses (PCA) using surveys from 34 African countries [10 (link)]. We obtained an indicator with three domains: (1) attitude to violence, based on the five questions asking the women’s opinion on whether a husband beating the wife is justified in specific situations; (2) social independence, comprising access to information, educational attainment, age at marriage and first child, and differences in age and education to the cohabiting partner; and (3) decision-making, based on the questions related to who makes decisions in the household and to the women’s work.
Considering the expert workshop recommendations (Panel 1), we excluded the item that indicates whether the woman worked in the last year and changed the categorization of the decision-making related variables, so that equal weights were given for joint decisions (with the partner or another person) and woman’s sole decision (Table 2).
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