Bayesian Analysis of a Quantile Multilevel Item Response Theory Model

Multilevel item response theory (MLIRT) models are used widely in educational and psychological research. This type of modeling has two or more levels, including an item response theory model as the measurement part and a linear-regression model as the structural part, the aim being to investigate the relation between explanatory variables and latent variables. However, the linear-regression structural model focuses on the relation between explanatory variables and latent variables, which is only from the perspective of the average tendency. When we need to explore the relationship between variables at various locations along the response distribution, quantile regression is more appropriate. To this end, a quantile-regression-type structural model named as the quantile MLIRT (Q-MLIRT) model is introduced under the MLIRT framework. The parameters of the proposed model are estimated using the Gibbs sampling algorithm, and comparison with the original (i.e., linear-regression-type) MLIRT model is conducted via a simulation study. The results show that the parameters of the Q-MLIRT model could be recovered well under different quantiles. Finally, a subset of data from PISA 2018 is analyzed to illustrate the application of the proposed model.