Psychometric properties of agency measuring instruments: a systematic review

Abstract

Agency capacity, related to the perception of protagonism on making decisions about one's own life, currently presents a previous record of investigations based on empirical studies, but there is still a lack of definition around the concept and the measurement of the phenomenon, considering the simplifications and generalizations observed. With that in mind, the goal of this systematic literature review is to analyze the psychometric properties of instruments for measuring personal agency. A systematic literature review was carried out with searches in six Brazilian and international databases on publications from up to 2020. We identified 23 instruments with this proposal, from the 55 documents analyzed. There were fragilities regarding the robustness of the presented psychometric properties, since most of them are limited to the internal structure validity. The convergent and divergent validities are little explored. An agency measurement instrument with statistical validation for the Brazilian context was not identified, only one instrument with semantic validation was found. The development of an instrument adapted to the Brazilian context is the main recommendation for future studies.