Examining Gender Differences in Students’ Attitude toward Blogs Using Measurement Invariance

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Why is it important?

This study tries to examine gender differences in students’ attitude towards blogs. In this study, we applied the graded response model (GRM) to assess differential item functioning (DIF) in the Persian blog attitude questionnaire (PBAQ) across male and female Iranian students. The participants were 565 tertiary-level students who took part voluntarily in completing the P-BAQ comprising three subscales: affective, behavioral, and perseverance-confidence. Our findings revealed that male and female students responded differently only to two out of twenty-five items in the PBAQ. These uniform-DIF items were found in the affective and perseverance-confidence subscales. To ascertain whether the difference between male and female students in responding to these items is affected by their perception of the items, we applied retaining and removing strategies. A significant change was found in results after removing item twenty-eight in the perseverance-confidence subscale. The results indicated that in affective and behavior subscales, the P-BAQ items are comparable between male and female students since both groups had the same perception of these items. However, we should be cautious of using the perseverance-confidence subscale. Examining gender differences can help researchers and educators to improve educational outcomes. The DIF analysis method can be applied to evaluate measurement equivalence of the other instruments accurately.