Measuring agency in children: the development and validation of the War Child Agency Assessment Scale - Palestinian version (WCAAS-Pal).

Abstract

In the present article, we aimed at construing a new quantitative measure of children's agency in Palestine. Within a socio-ecological and culturally and contextually informed perspective, the study introduces the development of a new instrument to investigate and evaluate children's agentic practices within their living contexts and their daily lives. First, we evaluated the model of measurement of WCAAS-Pal using a sequential exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Following the principles of testing a quantitative measure in the context of the dual-frame sampling method, the process of validating the quantitative measure was conducted on a group of 1,166 Palestinian children aged 9 to 14 years (m = 11.58, sd = 1.54). Second, a sample of 251 Palestinian children aged between 9 and 14 years (m = 11.82, sd = 1.53) was used to compute the reliability of the instrument along with both convergent and divergent validity using the Children Hope Scale and the Children Revised Impact of Event Scale-Arabic Version measures, respectively. The results of the EFA suggested a baseline seven-factor structure to be further assessed via CFA. A complex web of agency domains that might contribute to the child psychological functioning when forced to leave in conditions of ongoing threat and military violence emerged from the analysis.