The Web Index: gender bias findings from the Rating Scale model

The Web Index (WI), developed by the World Wide Web Foundation and launched in September 2012, aims at measuring the impact of the Web on people and nations. It is computed for 61 countries worldwide and consists of 85 indicators across 7 components: Communications Infrastructure, Institutional Infrastructure, Web Content, Web Use, Political Impact, Economic Impact and Social Impact of the Web (Farhan et al., 2012). Primary data are the backbone of the WI. Our analysis on primary data aimed at highlighting possible improvements of the questionnaire used to collect primary data and detecting specific behaviours both for countries and questions. To this purpose the Rating Scale model is employed for each of the components separately (Annoni et al., 2012). The Rasch model of Institutional Infrastructure explains about 62% of data variability and is clearly mono-dimensional implying that the questions are all indicative of a common, unique underlying construct. The response structure organised in a ten category scale is always appropriate. No country shows a notable unexpected pattern of answers, confirming that the questionnaire has been always scored by experts at their best.However a gender bias issue pops up.

ANNONI Paola;  WEZIAK-BIALOWOLSKA Dorota Maria; 

2013-02-28

American Educational Research Association

JRC76001

1051-0796,   

http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt263.pdf,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC76001,