Can life-skills be invariant across cultures? Evidence from India and Cambodia

• In Event: Beyond tool adaptation: how culture and context should inform the development, use and interpretation of SEL measures

Proposal

SEL programs are more and more prominent in international education. Within the realm of SEL programs, a few of them focus on life-skills for girls and women. Life skills are considered skills that enable people to deal with the needs of their daily lives (AGI, 2013). Life-skills programs targeting women, typically aim to increase women’s agency – or their “ability to define goals and act on them, to make decisions that matter to them, and to participate in the economy and public life” (Chang, et al., 2020, p4)). Following Kabeer’s (1999) framework, life-skills can be thought of as both, resources needed to develop and exercise agency and elements of agency itself (e.g., the ability to make decisions). However, agency does not exist in a vacuum and is mediated by cultural norms (Kabeer, 1999), suggesting that they operate differently in each context. A question that arises in this regard is the extent to which life-skills measures themselves, should be thought of as context specific.
There are multiple layers to contextualizing life-skills and examining their relationship to agency across contexts. For example, we need to understand whether the same life-skills are required in different contexts for women to effectively exercise their agency. Or whether the same life-skills (e.g., self-confidence) have a similar manifestation across cultures. Take two women with the same theoretical “ability” to express their emotions – is the ability to express emotions equally relevant in each context for the exercise of agency? And are these women going to express their emotions in the same way or will this vary due to contextual characteristics? This presentation is concerned with these questions.
Using data from a life-skills program operating in India and Cambodia, the presentation will explore the extent to which life-skills measures can be invariance across cultures, even after thorough processes of contextualization and adaptation. The presentation will also draw connections between these findings and individual characteristics of participants.
The study follows a quasi-experimental cross-sectional design with two data collection points. The study will use data collected from 1,035 six-grade girls at baseline and 1,047 eight-grade girls at endline who took the same life-skills assessment. The life-skills tool, designed to capture ten skills, underwent a process of contextualization in each of the countries before being used by the program, and was administered in the corresponding school languages. Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), the study will evaluate the latent structure that results of the administration of the assessment. In particular, using CFA, the analysis will determine the level of invariance reached by the scores across countries. In addition, by adding individual level covariates, the study will examine the extent to which characteristics such as socio-economic status may play a role in the way in which life-skills manifest across cultures. Last, via interviews to key stakeholders, the study will gain insight to the extent to which the life-skills tool is consistent with the local culture. Recommendations for measurement of life-skills and program evaluation will follow.

Author

• Fernanda Gándara, Room to Read