Trial reportSocial science & medicine (1982)2019
The effect of agency on women's mental distress: A prospective cohort study from rural Rajasthan, India.
Trial report in Social science & medicine (1982), 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Indian rural women's suicide beliefs and experiences: female suicidality as escape from and protest against a life usurped of agency.BMC women's health · 2026Article
- Linking Women's Empowerment to Mental Health Symptoms: Population-Based Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2026Article
- Gender discrimination, marital attitude, and perceived choice and awareness as explanatory factors of flourishing among young Indian unmarried women.Discover mental health · 2026Article
- Women's empowerment and health: nationwide insights on selected non-communicable conditions in Bangladesh.BMC public health · 2026Article
- The association between women's decision-making roles in sanitation and mental well-being in urban Bangladesh.Health & place · 2025Article
- Effects of an urban cable car intervention on quality of life: an observational, quasi-experimental study in Bogotá, Colombia (TrUST).Lancet regional health. Americas · 2025Article
- Female agency and probable depression in the perinatal period and beyond: Longitudinal findings from rural Pakistan.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- Tigers bringing risk and security: Gendered perceptions of tiger reintroduction in Rajasthan, India.Ambio · 2022Article
- Empowerment in pregnancy: ART adherence among women living with HIV in Cape Town, South Africa.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
- Defining Power and Agency in Gender Relations in El Salvador: Consequences for Intimate Partner Violence and Women's Mental Health.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Factors related to autonomy among Lebanese women: a web-based cross-sectional study.BMC women's health · 2021Article
- Women's participation in microfinance: Effects on Women's agency, exposure to partner violence, and mental health.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Agency, the ability to identify goals and then act upon them, is a core component of women's empowerment and has important implications for the rights and well-being of women and girls. However, inadequate measurement of agency impedes empirical investigation, and few studies have investigated the relation between agency and health. Using a theory-based measure of women's agency, we investigated the longitudinal association between agency and mental distress among women living in rural Rajasthan, India. Women completed baseline interviews between June and October 2016 and follow-up interviews between June and November 2017 (n = 2859). We measured mental distress with the Hindi version of the 12 item General Health Questionnaire, which asked women 12 questions about symptoms of mental distress (score range: 0-12). We measured agency using a measurement model which was composed of 23 indicators tapping into four domains of agency and validated in a prior research study. We modeled the relation between women's agency and mental distress using Poisson regression and an individual-level fixed effects approach to account for time-fixed characteristics of individuals. In models that controlled for time-varying confounding (e.g., household wealth, number of sons), a one standard deviation increase in agency was associated with a reduction of 0.21 distress symptoms (95% CI: -0.32, -0.09), which corresponds to a 7% reduction (95% CI: 3%, 11%) relative to the mean. We found that specific domains of agency varied in their association with mental distress; namely, an increase in women's agency regarding her attitudes about gender norms corresponded to a reduction in mental distress, whereas an increase in women's agency regarding speaking up in public corresponded to an increase in mental distress. Our research demonstrates that agency may be a determinant of mental health and that comprehensive measurement can reveal nuanced relationships.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.