Unpacking Joint Decision-making

The Measures for Advancing Gender Equality (MAGNET) initiative aims to broaden and deepen the measurement of women’s agency, based on the development of new tools and rigorous testing and comparison of both new and existing methods for measuring agency, and promoting the adoption of these measures at scale. By increasing the availability of innovative meaningful measures of agency for a broad range of contexts, we hope our work will lead to an improved understanding of what women’s agency is, how it manifests and how it can best be measured across contexts given the research question at hand. Improving women’s decision-making power is crucial for advancing gender equality. But evidence shows that wives and husbands have systematically different perceptions of who makes these decisions across contexts and intra-household disagreement is often not random; women “taking power” correlates with other women’s empowerment variables. This could be because the standard decision-making answer options “wife, husband, joint” is too categorical and it does not allow us to capture the strength in decision-making power (thinking it as a continuum), or because men and women have a different understanding of what sole/joint decision-making is. This tool, Unpacking Joint Decision-making, allows us to elicit responses regarding subjective assessments of a hypothetical married couple under different scenarios that involve the wife and the husband making household decisions around large household purchases. This tool is suited for nationally representative individual- or household-level surveys, and for targeted thematic or impact evaluation surveys designed to understand individuals' agency and decision-making. This data study includes following files. 1. A survey document (including implementation guidelines) 2. Two files, CAPI_Choices and CAPI_Survey, along with the accompanying files, can be used to construct a CAPI program ready for survey implementation. Alternatively, users can use an Excel workbook \"CAPI_.xlsx\" that includes worksheets for survey and choices, along with others, for constructing a CAPI program ready for survey implementation.推进性别平等衡量倡议（Measures for Advancing Gender Equality，缩写MAGNET）旨在拓宽并深化对女性能动性的衡量工作：通过开发新型工具，严格测试并对比新型与现有能动性衡量方法，并推动这些衡量方法的规模化应用。 通过为多元场景提供可获取、兼具创新性与实践意义的能动性衡量指标，我们期望本项目能够推动学界加深对女性能动性的内涵、表现形式的理解，并结合具体研究问题，明晰不同场景下的最优衡量路径。 提升女性决策权对于推进性别平等至关重要。但现有研究表明，在不同场景中，夫妻双方对“谁拥有家庭决策权”的认知存在系统性差异，且家庭内部的决策意见分歧往往并非随机：女性“掌握更多权力”的情况与其他女性赋权变量呈显著相关。这一现象可能源于两点：其一，标准决策选项“妻子、丈夫、共同决策”的分类过于僵化，无法体现决策权的强度差异（应将决策权视为一个连续谱系）；其二，男女双方对“单独决策”与“共同决策”的概念理解存在偏差。 本研究开发的「拆解共同决策」工具，可通过构建夫妻围绕大额家庭采购开展决策的各类假设场景，征集受访者对相关决策主体的主观评估反馈。该工具适配具有全国代表性的个人或家庭层面调查，以及旨在探究个体能动性与决策行为的针对性主题调查或影响评估调查。 本数据研究包含以下文件： 1. 一份调查文档（含实施指南） 2. `CAPI_Choices`与`CAPI_Survey`两个文件及其配套资料，可用于搭建可直接投入实施的计算机辅助个人访谈（Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing，缩写CAPI）程序。此外，使用者也可借助名为`CAPI_.xlsx`的Excel工作簿，该工作簿包含调查设置、选项配置等多个工作表，同样可用于搭建可直接投入调查实施的CAPI程序。