OBJECTIVES Estimates of group differences in functional disability may be biased if items exhibit differential item functioning (DIF). For a given item, DIF exists if persons in different groups do not have the same probability of responding, given their level of disability. This study examines the extent to which DIF affects estimates of age and gender group differences in disability severity ...

The Dataflow Interchange Format (DIF) is a standard language to specify mixed-grain dataflow models for digital signal, image, and video processing (DSP) systems and other streaming-related application domains. Major objectives of the DIF project are to design this standard language; to provide an extensible repository for representing, experimenting, and developing dataflow models and techniqu...

BACKGROUND Differential item functioning (DIF) methods can be used to determine whether different subgroups respond differently to particular items within a health-related quality of life (HRQoL) subscale, after allowing for overall subgroup differences in that scale. This article reviews issues that arise when testing for DIF in HRQoL instruments. We focus on logistic regression methods, which...

This study was to use differential item functioning (DIF) analysis to examine if there were items in the Mental, Emotional, and Bodily Toughness Inventory (MeBTough) functioning differently across gender and athletic membership. A total of 444 male (56.3%) and female (43.7%) participants (30.9% athletes and 69.1% non-athletes) responded to the MeBTough items. Using Mantel-Haenszel and SIBTEST m...

Background: Immunobullous diseases are morphologically heterogeneous and the differentiation between various subtypes is essential for proper treatment and prognosis. The aim of our study was to analyze and correlate clinical, histopathological, and immunofluorescence findings in autoimmune bullous diseases.Method: A c...

BACKGROUND The Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) is a widely used patient reported outcome in osteoarthritis. An important, but frequently overlooked, aspect of validating health outcome measures is to establish if items exhibit differential item functioning (DIF). That is, if respondents have the same underlying level of an attribute, does the item give the...

We have developed the dataflow interchange format (DIF) [2] and the associated DIF package for specifying and working with dataflow models for DSP systems. Our recent progress in the DIF project includes the DIF-based porting approach [2] for porting DSP designs across dataflowbased tools and the DIF-to-C software synthesis framework [3] for automatically generating C implementations from DSP s...

Differentiation-inducing factor-1 (DIF-1) is a morphogen that induces differentiation of DICTYOSTELIUM: Recently, DIF-1 has been shown to inhibit proliferation and induce differentiation in tumor cells, although the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. In this study, we examined the effects of DIF-1 on the proliferation and differentiation of vascular smooth muscle cells, to explore novel ther...

Active gibberellin (GA(1)) is an important mediator of thermoperiodic growth in pea. Plants grown under lower day than night temperature (negative DIF) elongate less and have reduced levels of GA(1) compared with plants grown at higher day than night temperature (positive DIF). By comparing the wild type (WT) and the elongated DELLA mutant la cry(s), this study has examined the effect of impair...

The presence of differential item functioning (DIF) in a test suggests bias that could disadvantage members of a certain group. Previous work with tests of visual learning abilities found significant DIF related to age groups in a car test (Lee, Cho, McGugin, Van Gulick, & Gauthier, 2015), but not in a face test (Cho et al., 2015). The presence of age DIF is a threat to the validity of the test...