Bifurcated Agency: Personal Decision-Making Styles Adopted by Widows in Nyakach Sub-County, Kisumu County, Kenya

This study examined the decision-making processes of widows in Nyakach Sub-County, Kisumu County, Kenya, alongside the contextual factors influencing these choices. Employing a convergent parallel mixed-methods design, data were collected from 300 widows engaged in an initiative spearheaded by the Kenya Legal and Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS (KELIN). Using Yamane's (1967) formula, participants were drawn from a sampling frame of approximately 1,200 widows through stratified purposive sampling, and the quantitative data were triangulated with semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. Consultative decision-making was the most frequently reported style, adopted by 42.3% of widows, followed by dependent decision-making at 36.0%; only 12.0% of widows reported deciding entirely on their own. Autonomy varied sharply across life domains: 85.3% of widows exercised full control over everyday household tasks, yet none (0.0%) reported autonomy over land or property. In addition, 81.0% of widows reported that they often or always suppressed their own preferences to conform to community expectations. These patterns were interpreted through Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 2014), Jack's (1991) theory of self-silencing, and Ryff's (1989) concept of environmental mastery. The findings suggest that widows' decision-making styles are not fixed personal traits but appear to shift with the social stakes of the decision at hand: independent action was concentrated in domains that posed little threat to patrilineal interests, while consultative behaviour in higher-stakes domains appeared, in the accompanying qualitative accounts, to function more as a display of deference than as genuine information-seeking. These findings carry implications for how decision-making is understood in relation to the psychological well-being of widows in patrilineal societies.

Decision-Making Styles, Widowhood, Self-Silencing, Social Cognitive Theory

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