An evaluation of the psychometric properties of the graduate advising survey for doctoral students

Abstract

Graduate advisors are reputed to be the most important persons that a graduate student will inter-act with during his/her graduate training. However, research indicates that some graduate students are not satisfied with the quality of their advising experiences. As a result, there has been national interest in understanding the nature and quality of graduate students' advising experiences. In this study the dimensional structure, psychometric properties, and differential item functioning of the Graduate Student Advising Survey that measured various aspects of the advising experiences of master's and doctoral students from across various disciplines were examined. Specifically, we applied a multidimensional Rasch Model for the purpose of exploring the dimensional structure and documenting the item quality, and we examined the probability of matched groups endorsing items differently. The results indicate that a six-factor model, as opposed to any other model, more appropriately explained the data. Based on the findings, the authors determined that the in-strument produces reliable measures that were relatively consistent across demographic groups.