Development of a Scale to Measure the Empowerment of Soliga Tribal Women in Chamarajanagar District, Karnataka, India

India has a large number of tribal population as compared to other countries in the world. Despite being considered as first inhabitants of the nation, tribes are deprived of their basic needs of daily life. They are not only socially, economically and educationally backward and also face discrimination in many ways especially among women. Hence the study was conducted on Soliga tribal women who were more vulnerable to development and an attempt was made to develop and standardize a scale to measure the extent of empowerment among Soliga tribal women. Likert and Edward summated rating scale was employed, based on the procedure 140 statements under six dimensions were identified and sent to 105 judges for the relevancy analysis. After relevancy test 99 statements were retained and tested in non sample area of Soligara colony in Heggadadevana kote taluk of Mysore district. Criterion group was performed to evaluate the individual statements and critical ratio was calculated using t test. The eighty eight statements with the highest t value equal to or greater than 1.69 were subjected to the reliability in non sampling area. Correlation coefficient 0.931 and ‘r’ value of 0.926, which was found significant at one per cent level indicating the high reliability of the scale. Validity coefficient was found to be 0.962 for the scale which was higher than standard requirement of 0.70 which signifies scale was suitable and appropriate under the dimensions of social, economic, health, psychological, political and legal components of Soliga trial women. The developed scale with 88 statements was administered with 32 respondents in non sample area and it was observed that 37.50 per cent of Soliga tribal women belongs to medium empowerment category followed by low (34.38 %) and high (28.12 %) empowerment category.