Evaluation approaches to empowering interventions

Abstract

Empowerment has been a widespread term since the 1990s and is common in contexts as social work, community development, psychology, medicine, and several other areas of human development and health. Empowerment is a process during which a person, an organization, or a community is enabled to identify themselves, to recognize their own power positions and to improve their unequal social situations (Varga, 2017). The evaluation of empowerment outcomes has been missing from the Hungarian professional literature.  This review article focuses on the empowerment of adults through educational theatre and drama, and is based on the analysis of previous research results in the area.

Empowerment is a multi-level, context-dependent construct, hence, evaluating empowerment outcomes is challenging. Theorists of empowerment warn against creating a general instrument for measurement (Zimmerman, 1995). I reflect on quantitative, qualitative, and combined evaluation methods, such as the Psychological Empowerment Scale (Akey et al., 2000), the Empowerment Evaluation (Fetterman, 2001), and the Empowerment Measuring Tool (Jupp et al., 2010), also taking Wandersman and associates’ (2005) principles for empowerment evaluation into account.