Validation of the Brief Georgian Empowerment Scale in Community Context in Georgian Republic

Background: This study examined the validity of the Brief Georgian Empowerment Scale (BGES) with a sample of community residents in Republic of Georgia. Empowerment-related outcomes are rarely evaluated in international community development contexts because of the lack of valid measures of the construct and the lack of empirical studies investigating the associations between empowerment and other constructs (Cattaneo & Chapman, 2010). The BGES is a translated version of the recently developed Brief Azerbaijani Empowerment Scale (Cheryomukhin & Peterson, 2014), a 12-item instrument designed to assess the relational and intrapersonal components of psychological empowerment in community context in the neighboring former Soviet country of Azerbaijan. This study examined the factor structure of the BGES instrument and its associations with a set of conceptually related variables: community participation, a sense of community, alienation and depression.

Methods: This study is cross-sectional, non-experimental, and involves collection of primary data using self-administered paper surveys. Procedures suggested for scale development by the International Test Commission (2010). and others (e.g., DeVellis, 2003; Fabrigar et al., 1999; Rubio et al., 2003; Worthington & Whittaker, 2006) were followed. The face and content validity of the GBES instrument were assessed by a panel of Georgian and American social scientists and experts in empowerment theory, community organizing, scale development and program evaluation. A purposeful sampling strategy was used to recruit 300 subjects in several urban and rural communities in Georgia. All the study participants were adults. The sample was diverse in terms of the participants’ demographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, education, and employment status) and in terms of participants' degrees of involvement in various local initiatives and community-based organizations such as school committees, neighborhood committees, and issue-specific groups.

Data analysis: Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was utilized to explore the underlying factor structure of the Georgian data. Path analysis was utilized to test whether conceptually-relevant variables, including measures of community participation, a sense of community, alienation, and depression, predicted the GBES measure as expected by theory.

Results: In result of CFA procedures, fit indices such as TLI and CFI were higher than .95, while RMSEA was less than .06, which indicated a good fit to the data. Cronbach's alpha for the overall GBES measure and its subscales ranged from .79 to .86. Path model demonstrated that the overall GBES measure was positively associated with the measures of sense of community and community participation, and it was negatively linked with depression and alienation.

Implications: These findings suggest that GBES has good validity and reliability. The instrument can be used in future research on empowerment as well as in evaluation of empowerment-oriented community interventions in Georgia. More research is needed to examine additional components of psychological empowerment and to test and improve this scale in community contexts in Georgia and neighboring countries in the South Caucasus and Central Asia.