Estimating the Importance of Differential Item Functioning

Tamás Rudas and Rebecca Zwick

Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 1997, vol. 22, issue 1, 31-45

Abstract: Several methods have been proposed to detect differential item functioning (DIF), an item response pattern in which members of different demographic groups have different conditional probabilities of answering a test item correctly, given the same level of ability. In this article, the mixture index of fit, proposed by Rudas, Clogg, and Lindsay (1994) , is used to estimate the fraction of the population for which DIF occurs, and this approach is compared to the Mantel-Haenszel ( Mantel & Haenszel, 1959 ) test of DIF developed by Holland (1985 ; see Holland & Thayer, 1988) . The proposed estimation procedure, which is noniterative, can provide information about which portions of the item response data appear to be contributing to DIF.

Keywords: differential item functioning; Mantel-Haenszel test; maximum likelihood estimation; mixture index of fit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jedbes:v:22:y:1997:i:1:p:31-45

DOI: 10.3102/10769986022001031

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