Measurement Tools

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The Dignity Project creates open access, ready-translated tools to help people measure: is their program respectful?

This page will contain the measurement tools we develop, as we build them.

This is an ongoing campaign. These measures are all under development, and we plan to keep updating them. Please check back for the latest version, and please get in touch if you have suggestions or spot errors. 

Credit

These tools are open access. We hope you’ll use them. You do not need permission to do so.

If you use them, you must give full credit to Tom Wein, Priyanka Khatry and The Dignity Project, linking to this website, in any publications that result.

We would also be grateful if you would get in touch, notifying us of your use of them.

A five-item survey measure

The five questions below form a validated survey scale for understanding people’s experiences of respect for their dignity in receiving aid. Please attribute this work to the authors and The Dignity Project if you use it in your work.

Thinking about the interaction you just described, please rate your experience on the statements below:

  1. The organization treated me with dignity.
  2. The organization representative listened to my requests.
  3. I felt respected by the organization.
  4. I felt valued by the organization.
  5. I felt supported by the organization.

(Strongly disagree / Disagree / Neither / Agree / Strongly agree)

Validation and performance

An item pool was generated and refined through a review of the literature, expert assessment, and 10 cognitive interviews conducted in Morocco and China. The resulting items were examined through quantitative research in Morocco, China and the USA (n = 717). Based on these results, we recommend the above five-item scale. This scale showed high internal consistency (α = 0.9088).

The scale performed consistently well (α > 0.7) across all three countries, three situations (financial services, healthcare and policing), and across gender, age, education, disability, socio-economic status, income, household size, marital status and urbanisation, suggesting it is appropriate for use with a wide range of contexts and populations. 

Furthermore, the scale displayed convergent validity with a series of previously published scales that the literature suggested it would correlate with: r from 0.324-0.800 for scales measuring self-dehumanization, happiness, self-efficacy, self-integrity, and cultural syndrome. Convergent validity was not observed with scales for social desirability and cooperation. Principal Components Analysis suggests this may be treated as a single construct (ρ = 0.4795).

Special thanks to Rachna Bhimani (support in analysis), Chris Ho (China support in translation), Zakaria Assaid (Morocco support in translation) and Joel Mumo (support in review). A paper reporting these results is in progress.

Don’t forget, this scale is based on a particular definition of dignity and respectfulness. You can read more about the theory and definitions that underpin all of this here. In the future we’ll be working on an incentive-compatible version of the measure, and validating it for new contexts.