OBJECTIVES: Empowerment is a multi-faceted construct that, in the cancer context, refers to feelings of being able to manage the challenges of the disease and gain a sense of control over the cancer experience. Empowerment is a multi-facetted and difficult to measure construct, and few patient empowerment measures exist for cancer research. We evaluated the psychometrics of the Health Education Impact Questionnaire (heiQ) evaluation system originally developed for chronic diseases in Australia. It has been translated into 19 languages, applied across diseases, interventions and healthcare settings. Five of the original 8 scales were considered conceptually relevant to the empowerment construct in cancer; Emotional wellbeing, Constructive attitudes and approaches, Skill and technique acquisition, Social integration and support, and Health services navigation. METHODS: We recruited English-speaking Canadians diagnosed <27 months earlier with different types of cancer who were randomly selected from the population-based Manitoba Cancer Registry, and from users of the Canadian Cancer Society telephone support programs. Participants (n=731) completed a mailed questionnaire including the heiQ, other related constructs and demographic questions. Traditional psychometric analyses and modern confirmatory factor analysis (CFA: LISREL) were used to examine psychometric structure and construct validity. RESULTS: Ordinal CFA with robust maximum likelihood estimation gave very good model fit (χ2(265)=528.17, RMSEA=0.038, NNFI=0.994, CFI=0.995, SRMR=0.055). Factor loadings were moderately high (0.65-0.91). Cronbach alphas were 0.76 to 0.85. A priori hypotheses regarding the magnitude and direction of correlations between certain heiQ scales and measures of cancer self-efficacy were supported. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide strong evidence that the five constructs conceptualized as representing key dimensions of empowerment perform well in cancer survivors. This is the first formal validation of the heiQ empowerment-related dimensions in the cancer setting. These scales will fill an important gap in cancer research and evaluation by providing validated measures of important effects of cancer information and support interventions.