Psychological Empowerment

Conceptualization and Measurement

The term empowerment has been used intermittently over the past few decades for various political and ideological purposes. In many cases, it has been vaguely or superficially applied. This entry discusses psychological empowerment as it has been theorized and studied empirically in the applied social sciences. One tension has emerged between conceptualization and measurement of psychological empowerment: debate over the distinction between a feeling or a psychological sense of empowerment and the real ability to operate with social power. With these distinctions in mind, the most commonly used conceptual framework for psychological empowerment consists of three components: (1) intrapersonal (emotional), (2) interactional (cognitive), and (3) behavioral.

The intrapersonal (emotional) component of psychological empowerment has been the most widely studied. The sociopolitical control scale, which measures leadership competence and policy control, is used in most studies. A high level of intrapersonal psychological empowerment indicates self-perceptions of control, efficacy, motivation, and competence in the sociopolitical domain. The interactional (cognitive) component of psychological empowerment has been studied as knowledge of the source, nature, and instruments of social power. This includes the understanding that social power is most effectively exercised by groups rather than individuals, that conflict is a common outcome of the exercise of social power, and that those with power use it to reward their friends and punish their enemies, to include and exclude people from decisions or information, and to shape public perceptions and ideology.

The behavioral component of psychological empowerment has been conceptualized as community or citizen participation. An unsettled issue is whether psychological empowerment should include a behavioral component or participation should be treated as a distinct but strongly related variable. Many studies show that participation is related to the intrapersonal component of psychological empowerment, but it appears to be less strongly related to the interactional component. One relevant factor here may be uncertainty regarding how to measure community participation or the other components of psychological empowerment. For instance, the types of activities that are included in measures of community participation have tended to vary across studies, and most measures are simply summations of a variety of civically focused behaviors. However, lack of covariance between components of psychological empowerment may also have to do with the complex and sometimes paradoxical nature of empowerment processes. Several studies have shown relationships between empowerment, participation, and other psychosocial variables (e.g., psychological sense of community) in relationships that are moderated by other variables, including demographic characteristics and the different roles that people play in processes. Furthermore, most researchers agree that processes of [Page 540]psychological empowerment unfold in ways that require context-specific study.

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