Measuring the Psychological Outcomes of Empowerment Evaluation’s Practices and Principles

This study contributed to a small body of research on empowerment evaluation, viewed here as a social intervention. It examined its processes and principles to determine whether historically conceptualized empowerment and self-determination outcomes resulted from a sample of 131 empowerment evaluations. Objectives included: determining implementation fidelity to each empowerment evaluation model; determining evidence of empowerment evaluation process principles; determining whether empowerment evaluation outcome principles resulted from sample evaluations; and determining whether variation in empowerment and self-determination was explained by interaction between model fidelity and percentage of steps implemented, process principles in evidence, outcome principles in evidence, and evaluator characteristics. Results indicated that, as hypothesized, individual empowerment and self-determination were the likely outcomes of the sample evaluations, that empowerment and self-determination outcomes were more likely when the empowerment evaluations were conducted by female evaluators living and working in an African country, and that a new instrument, Survey on Empowerment Evaluation Practice, Principles, and Outcomes (SEEPPO) was a successful first attempt at assessing the processes, principles, and outcomes of empowerment evaluation work.