Exploring the Impact of Self-Help Groups on Empowering Rural Women: an Examination of the Moderating Role of Self-Help Group Membership Using Structural Equation Modeling

AbstractThe purpose of this research is to create a statistical model that can predict how much rural women ’s empowerment increases as a result of their involvement in SHGs. The study also aims to determine whether women participating in self-help groups has a moderating effect on women’s empowerment. Factor analysis and partial least square structural equation modeling are used to achieve this study ’s objective. Multigroup analysis examines SHG membership as moderators. The present research used a purposive sampling strategy to collect data from 228 women who have actively participated and 221 women who have not actively part in SHG rural areas of eastern West Bengal. The present study utili zed partial least square and structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine and evaluate a hypothesis concerning the correlation between the involvement of women in Self-Help Groups (SHGs) and their empowerment. The results show that women’s empowerment is significantly affected by all four con structs of economic empowerment (β = 0.267,t = 4.706,p = 0.000), social empowerment (β = 0.105,t = 2.065,p = 0.0039), political empowerment (β = 0.147,t = 2.798,p = 0.005), and psychological empowerment (β = 0.156,t = 2.631,p = 0.009). The moderation effect of membership in SHGs is high in the case of economic and social empowerment of women. Women’s participation in SHGs is associated with increased economic activity and social em...
Source: Global Social Welfare - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research