MEASUREMENT INVARIANCE OF DIGITAL PARTICIPATION ATTITUDES ACROSS CULTURES

Abstract

This research investigates whether individuals harboring differing cultural backgrounds exhibit equivalent attitudes toward digital participation, using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) as the analytical cornerstone. Since digital participation progressively determines the ways citizens engage in civic duties, access educational opportunities, and attain social inclusion, clarifying whether the underlying attitudinal constructs possess consistent conceptual and metric properties across varied cultural contexts becomes a critical step in understanding both the fairness and comparability of empirical findings in the expanding literature on digital engagement. We apply an advanced psychometric approach to investigate configural, metric, and scalar invariance within three culturally distinct populations: East Asian, Western European, and Sub-Saharan African. Data were gathered using the validated Digital Participation Attitude Scale (DPAS) from 1,200 respondents, evenly distributed among the three regions. The findings advance theories of digital inclusion by underscoring the necessity of cultural awareness in research on digital participation. We propose practical adaptations of digital engagement strategies to accommodate localized attitudes. By rigorously establishing measurement equivalence, the research guards against the misinterpretation of cross-cultural findings stemming from latent construct divergence. The work underscores that equity in digital participation extends beyond access, necessitating sensitivity to varying cultural scripts that inform users' attitudes. This study expands the field of digital psychology and cross-cultural methods by presenting a robust, replicable framework for psychometric validation that holds true across a range of sociocultural contexts.