Rethinking Measures of Psychological Agency: A Study on the Urban Fringe of Bamako

Abstract

Attempts to measure psychological agency have drawn on social psychology scholarship. Nonetheless, it is well documented that the Euro/American psychology paradigm is challenged by its tendency to universalise its theories. This raises a challenge for development scholars trying to measure the psychological domain; especially regarding understanding what the psychological domain may mean to people outside the Western liberal tradition. We examine the use of theoretical measures of psychological agency against local concepts of psychological agency from a neighbourhood on the urban fringe of Bamako. We conclude that there is no clear association between local and theoretical measures of psychological agency and therefore there is a need to include local and theoretical measures in the study of agency.

Acknowledgement

Paola Ballon acknowledges financial support from grant JEDC/2015-2 and Elise Klein acknowledges a fieldwork grant given by Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and by the Department of International Development, University of Oxford.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Writing about ka da I yèrè la and dusu is fraught. Nuance can be lost in translation where we have tried to articulate the inductive definitions of terms that have emerged in the research (by suggesting ka da I yèrè la and dusu may be understood as similar to self-belief and internal motivation). As this paper is written in English, a translation of the two concepts is required. Therefore, we are not claiming any absolute definition of ka da I yèrè la and dusu. Instead the descriptions used within the text only carve out a space in which the actual definition would be situated. Like a road sign, they are pointing to a space to where one would find the absolute definition if desired. However, even if losing meaning in translation were not an issue, caution should be raised against the pursuit of absolute definitions. Following Lacan (1977), the quest to find an absolute definition would possibly be an infinite task as exact meanings of terms vary between people, and always will as language, like all structures, changes through time and space.

2. Whilst JDS has a policy to allow third party access to data sets used in publications, this is not possible for this study. Unfortunately, the ethics application granted for the original study does not allow for the data to be passed on to other parties.

3. For a deeper analysis of psy-expertise in development see Klein and Mills (2017); Klein (2017).

4. Female interviewee, the neighbourhood, 5 January 2011.

5. This coefficient takes values between 0 and 1, with higher values denoting more concordance and 1 meaning full concordance.