Coping Engagement as the Pathway from Psychological Empowerment to Life Satisfaction: A Mediation and Moderation Independent Analyses Among Women in Northern Peru

Psychological empowerment is associated with women’s well-being, yet how it translates into life satisfaction in high-informality Latin American settings remains untested—as does whether empowerment must cross a threshold before any benefit appears. We tested mediation and moderation hypotheses as separate questions with 251 women aged 18–44 from three northern Peruvian regions using PLS-SEM with 5000 bootstrap resamples. Coping engagement fully mediated the empowerment–life satisfaction relationship (indirect β = 0.134, 95% CI [0.065, 0.213]; VAF = 87.6%; R2 [engagement] = 0.070, R2 [life satisfaction] = 0.285); the direct path was non-significant (β = 0.019, p = 0.754). Mediation and moderation were examined as separate analytical questions; the formal index of moderated mediation was non-significant, indicating that the indirect effect did not differ significantly across subgroups. In exploratory threshold analyses, empowerment predicted life satisfaction only above a normative cut-point anchored to the IMWE scoring manual (≥136; β = 0.382, p < 0.001); below it, the association was flat (β = 0.047, p = 0.547). This pattern is instrument-anchored rather than empirically derived and should be treated as hypothesis-generating pending replication with an independently optimized cut-point. Age moderated the engagement–satisfaction link (β = −0.239, p = 0.031), with stronger effects among younger women; motherhood amplified the negative impact of disengagement on satisfaction (β = −0.272, p = 0.021). Tentatively, programs that move participants only modestly along the empowerment continuum may under-deliver on well-being outcomes, though firm prescriptions require independent confirmation; tailored design for mothers and younger women is warranted.