Low test-taking effort as a validity threat is common when examinees perceive an assessment context to have minimal personal value. Prior research has shown that in such contexts, subgroups may differ in their effort, which raises two concerns when making subgroup mean comparisons. First, it is unclear how differential effort could influence evaluations of scale property equivalence. Second, if attaining full scalar invariance, the degree to which differential effort can bias subgroup mean comparisons is unknown. To address these issues, a simulation study was conducted to examine the influence of differential noneffortful responding (NER) on evaluations of measurement invariance and latent mean comparisons. Results showed that as differential rates of NER grew, increased Type I errors of measurement invariance were observed only at the metric invariance level, while no negative effects were apparent for configural or scalar invariance. When full scalar invariance was correctly attained, differential NER led to bias of mean score comparisons as large as 0.18 standard deviations with a differential NER rate of 7%. These findings suggest that test users should evaluate and document potential differential NER prior to both conducting measurement quality analyses and reporting disaggregated subgroup mean performance.

当应试者认为评估环境具有最小的个人价值时，作为有效性威胁的低应试努力很常见。先前的研究表明，在这种情况下，子组的努力可能会有所不同，这在进行子组均值比较时会引起两个问题。首先，尚不清楚不同的努力如何影响对规模属性等价的评估。其次，如果达到全标量不变性，差异努力可以在多大程度上偏向亚组均值比较是未知的。为了解决这些问题，进行了一项模拟研究，以检查差异非努力响应 (NER) 对测量不变性和潜在均值比较评估的影响。结果表明，随着 NER 差异率的增加，仅在度量不变性水平上观察到增加的 I 型测量不变性误差，而对配置或标量不变性没有明显的负面影响。当正确获得全标量不变性时，差分 NER 导致平均分数比较的偏差高达 0.18 个标准差，差分 NER 率为 7%。这些发现表明，测试用户应该在进行测量质量分析和报告分解的子组平均性能之前评估和记录潜在的差异 NER。