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This study aimed to develop a country-specific index to measure women empowerment among married women aged 15–49 years in Afghanistan. The data from the 2015 Afghanistan demographic health survey (ADHS) was used to develop the index. The data on 26 variables across eight hypothesized domains related to women empowerment were used in EFA to probe the underlying domains in the data. CFA examined the structural validity of hypothesized factors in EFA. Four indicators were dropped during the analysis either due to the low and significantly different loading on one factor as compared to other indicators or due to overlap with other indicators loaded on different factors. The final model included 22 indicators across seven domains (labor force participation, attitude toward violence, decision-making, access to healthcare, literacy, age at critical life events, and property-owning) and had Cronbach's alpha = 0.69; indicative of good internal reliability. The goodness-of-fit test represented an acceptable level of construct validity with the likelihood ratio, RMSEA, and SRMR values ≤ 0.05 and CFI and TLI > 0.95. The developed index shares a common ground for future research concerning women empowerment in Afghanistan and can enhance the comparability of the results across future studies. In addition, having a standard index for women empowerment at the individual and country level could help assess the progress and efforts that have been made to achieve gender equality (SDG 5), and guide the direction of future policies and interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study was an attempt to validate the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ; Pintrich & De Groot, 1990) for high school students of Afghanistan, with 81 items in Dari language. From different government and private high schools, 356 students (183 girls and 173 boys) participated in the study. SPSS Amos version 23 was used to confirm the psychometrics, using goodness of fit estimates from the data of 356 students. Out of the 15 subscales of the original MSLQ, six subscales that is Intrinsic Goal Orientation, Extrinsic Goal Orientation, Control of Learning Beliefs, Test anxiety, Effort regulation, and Help seeking got were not retained. Therefore, in the present context nine subscales of the MSLQ were found to be valid and reliable for assessing self-regulated learning strategies and using it on the children for planning educational interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural development is one of the main concerns of developing countries. The consequences of lack of development in rural areas such as widespread poverty, unemployment and migration have led to more attention to rural development. According to the latest report of the Statistics Center of Afghanistan (2020), out of the total population of this country, about 23.4 million people (71%), live in rural areas. At the same time, rural areas face various economic, social, cultural, managerial and environmental challenges. Therefore, identifying Afghanistan's rural development challenges is a prerequisite to developing policies, plans, and providing a flexible model for achieving sustainable rural development. In this regard, the main purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the major challenges of rural development in Afghanistan. The statistical population included 60 experts on agricultural and rural development. The data collection tool was a questionnaire and its method was face-to-face interview. For data analysis, coefficient of variation and confirmatory factor analysis were used. The results of this study showed that several challenges including economic (such as lack of credits and investments in rural areas), social (such as women's low participation in rural activities), environmental (such as improper exploitation of groundwater), physical (such as the weakness or lack of rural-urban network), and managerial (especially the dominance of unskilled laborers in rural economic activities) challenges, have influenced rural development in Afghanistan, respectively. Undoubtedly, any effort to eliminate them will play a significant role in achieving sustainable rural and consequently national development of this country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Selfitis—which started off as a hoax but has now been investigated empirically—has been defined as the obsessive–compulsive desire to take photos of oneself and post them on social media. Furthermore, a scale to assess selfitis, the Selfitis Behavior Scale (SBS), has been developed. This study applied advanced psychometric testing methods, including confirmatory factor analysis (utilizing classical test theory) and the Rasch model (utilizing modern test theory), to examine the psychometric properties among Persian speakers (in Iran and Afghanistan). The participants (3163 Iranians and 1100 Afghanistani) completed an online survey posted on Instagram pages. The SBS showed promising properties, including satisfactory reliability (e.g., internal consistency and test–retest reliability), excellent construct validity (e.g., good fit in the CFA and Rasch models), and acceptable measurement invariance across Iranian and Afghan samples. Consequently, the SBS is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing selfitis among Persian-speaking samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]