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measuringmobility-instructions
Toolkit Instructions
Step 1: Decide what to measure
Poverty is not just a lack of money. Likewise, getting out of poverty entails not just increasing income, wealth, and other material resources. Mobility from poverty also requires gaining more power and control in one’s own life. In addition, research suggests that a third factor — being valued in one’s community — both precedes and results from economic success.
In this toolkit, we offer validated measures of all three of these factors associated with mobility from poverty: economic success, power and autonomy, and being valued in community. We encourage you to consider all three factors when designing programs for supporting mobility from poverty. We also invite you to measure all three factors when evaluating your efforts.
Below we discuss these three factors in greater detail. For even more information, please see our brief on measuring mobility from poverty.
Economic success includes outcomes that directly contribute to a person or family’s material well-being and includes increased income, earnings, assets, and employment. Getting accurate estimates of economic success can be challenging. So this toolkit offers well-established measures that have been validated and whose strengths and limitations are well understood.
Power is a person’s ability to influence their environment, other people, and their own outcomes; and autonomy is a person’s ability to act according to their own choices, as opposed to other’s decisions. Studies with people living on lower incomes suggest that power and autonomy can both drive and result from social mobility. In this toolkit, we offer reliable measures of power, autonomy, and related outcomes like agency, self-efficacy, and sense of control.
Being valued in community is a person’s sense that they belong and are included among family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and other members of society. A related concept is social capital, which is a web of relationships that has economic benefits. Being valued in community gives people access to resources such as nutritious food, clean water, and safety. At the same time, not being valued in community increases people’s exposure to pollution, violence, and trauma. In this toolkit, we offer reliable measures of belonging and related outcomes such as social support, loneliness, and social standing.
Some theorists contrast power with belonging, or autonomy with community. Yet these constructs often overlap, particularly in communities with fewer material resources. In many communities, for example, one’s sense of power is often tied to one’s status. Likewise, one’s sense of autonomy is often linked to one’s relationships. So we take special care to select measures that do not assume a tradeoff between power and belonging, and, indeed, include some measures that capture both constructs at once.
Step 2: Consider the cultures you are working with
As many linguists, anthropologists, and cultural psychologists have shown, no word or sentence has the exact same meaning in two different cultures. Yet some measures are better than others at capturing similar experiences in different populations. Measures that accurately assess the same psychological construct in different groups of people are said to have high cultural equivalence.
Because most measures were created and validated for use with middle-class people, cultural equivalence problems often arise in research with people in poverty. For example, many power and autonomy measures include items such as, “When I decide to do something, I just do it.” Researchers usually interpret low scores on these measures as meaning that respondents have low levels of power and autonomy. Yet among people in poverty, low scores may instead mean that respondents are accurately reporting that their everyday lives seldom allow them to “just do it.” At the same time, these same people may show high levels of power and autonomy in situations that let them exercise these qualities. For this reason, researchers should interpret people’s scores on measures in light of their actual social, political, economic, and environmental opportunities and constraints.
In this toolkit, we have curated measures that have high cultural equivalence across many groups. Nevertheless, when selecting which measures to use, ask yourself the following questions:
- What are respondents’ and researchers’ social classes? How might these different socioeconomic groups differently interpret the measure’s items and results?
- What are respondents’ and researchers’ races and ethnicities? How might these different racial/ethnic groups differently interpret the measure’s items and results?
- What are respondents’ and researchers’ genders? How might these different gender groups differently interpret the measure’s items and results?
- What are respondents’ and researchers’ ages? How might these different age groups differently interpret the measure’s items and results?
- What are other important cultural distinctions among respondents and researchers? How might these different groups differently interpret the measure’s items and results?
Step 3: Clarify your respondents’ needs
Are you working with young children? Teens? Adults?
How comfortable are your participants with reading?
How much time can they spend filling out measures?
The Measure Selector in this toolkit will allow you to sort the instruments according to participants’ ages and reading levels, as well as the time it will take them to complete the measure.
