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Community-level action may be required to achieve the levels of sanitation uptake necessary for health gains. Evidence suggests that collective action is influenced by collective efficacy (CE)—a group’s belief in its abilities to organize and execute action to achieve common goals. The extent to which it is necessary to fully contextualize existing CE measurement tools, in order to conduct meaningful assessments of the factors influencing CE perceptions, is not well understood. This study examines the value added of contextualizing an existing CE measurement tool using qualitative formative research. We employed a modified grounded theory approach to develop a contextualized CE framework based on qualitative data from rural Cambodian villages. The resulting framework included sub-constructs that were pertinent for the rural Cambodian context for which an existing, hypothesized framework did not account: perceived risks/benefits, action knowledge, shared needs/benefits, and external accountability. Complex confirmatory factor analyses indicated that contextualized models fit the data better than hypothesized models for women and men. This study demonstrates that inductive, qualitative research allows community-derived factors to enhance existing tools for context-specific CE measurement. Additional research is needed to determine which CE factors transcend contexts and could, thus, form the foundation of a general CE measurement tool.

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