or because they face restrictions in participating? Alternatively, does the respondent’s nonparticipation in decision-making in fact constitute a manifestation of agency (e.g., she prefers not to be engaged in certain aspects of household decision-making, or has delegated the task to someone else)?

Sen’s work on capabilities discusses how the absence of protest on the part of household members could reflect adaption to the situation (adaptive preferences), or be related to the costs of speaking out (Agarwal 1997). For example, a woman might not work outside the home because of the cultural norms she has internalized or because her partner will not allow her to do. However, she might also have reflected on her preferences and autonomously decided she would rather not work outside the household. Understanding underlying goal-setting and preferences therefore allows us to interpret whether observed actions correspond to an exercise of agency, or not. Without knowing whether an individual has welldefined and internally regulated goals in mind when engaging in certain actions, we cannot know to what extent they are engaged in the process of agency. Moreover, by definition, agency is about more than observable action: it is about the motivation and purpose which individuals assign to their actions.

Due to its centrality in generating purpose-driven behavior, the ability to define value-based goals has been studied in social determination theory as well as social psychology (and more recently, behavioral economics). While social determination theory has focused on determining whether an individual’s goals and actions are indeed guided by their own values, the latter disciplines have explored individuals’ inclination and cognitive ability to define goals more generally. We review measurement tools across these disciplines below.

# **3.1.1     Motivational Autonomy**

The most common measurement of whether an individual’s actions are “regulated by self” is the Relative Autonomy Index (RAI), developed in psychology studies (Ryan and Deci 2000). The RAI attempts to assess to what extent the motivation behind actions are driven by an individual’s own goals (“intrinsic motivation”), or externally regulated through internalized social pressure or coercion. First developed for late-elementary and middle school children to measure individual differences in types of motivation concerning school work and prosocial behavior (Ryan and Connell 1989), it has since been used to measure motivational autonomy in adults across a variety of areas (or ‘domains’). Unlike most tools created by psychologists for use in Western countries, the cultural applicability of the RAI has been explored in crosscountry work (Chirkov et al. 2011), although few of the validations have occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The RAI has been incorporated in the 2012 Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Survey Index (WEAI) module, the result of a partnership between Feed the Future, IFPRI, USAID, and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), in order to measure men and women’s relative autonomy in agricultural production. This version of the RAI tool is presented in Box 1, below.

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