2012) and prayer application (Wyche, Caine & et.al, 2008). In addition there are various. Islamic application including Quran reader pro, qibla direction, prayer ...
MEASURING USERS’ AWARENESS AND USAGE TOWARDS MOBILE ISLAMIC CONTENT (MIC) USING RASCH MODEL Ismassabah Ismail1, Marina Ismail1 and Fariza Hanis Abd Razak1 1
Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, UiTM Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia {isma,marina,fariza}@tmsk.uitm.edu.my
Abstract Although many applications can be found on the mobile platform including Islamic content, but the study of users’ awareness and usage of Islamic content on mobile platform was hardly found. This study analysed the pattern of users’ awareness and usage that were later proposed as one component in the construction model of mobile Islamic content (MIC). The study used the self-developed instrument to assess awareness and usage in Islamic content on mobile platform while Rasch measurement model was used to analyze the data collected from the survey. Results of the study show that awareness towards MIC did not totally give impact towards usage. The result also suggests that user interested towards entertainment application that related mostly with multimedia elements. The result also found out the big gap of usage between Mobile Quran and Mobile Seerah that will lead to the future analysis on information organization and screen display of existing MIC.
Keywords: mobile Islamic content, Rasch measurement model, awareness, usage
1. Introduction The mobile technology has also been changing the religion landscape especially Islam where the dissemination of knowledge is not only restricted to books, preaching or radio anymore but can go beyond those boundaries.Mobile platform for Islamic knowledge dissemination has been carried out in various content such as Islamic medication expert system (Jung, Kasbon & et.al, 2008), mobile dictionary for pilgrims (Zeki, Alsafi & et.al, 2012) and prayer application (Wyche, Caine & et.al, 2008). In addition there are various Islamic application including Quran reader pro, qibla direction, prayer times, adzan, prayers, halal food guide and Islamic hotline (Bunt, 2010) but the Islamic knowledge dissemination on Islamic historical content especially for Seerah Rasulallah (history of Prophet Muhammad pbuh) even found, still lack of multimedia elements and attraction . With the innovation of ICT especially the internet and mobile technology, the Islamic knowledge dissemination should also keep abreast with the technology. Even there are many research conducted regarding the attitudes and perceptions towards mobile learning(Fahad,2009),usage of mobile phone by elderly(Nasir, Hassan & et.al,2008), and using mobile learning for environmental awareness (Uzunboylu,Cavus & et.al,2008) but the study of users’ awareness and usage of mobile Islamic content was hardly found. Thus, a study was conducted to see the pattern of users’ regarding their awareness and usage for producing result that can be a stepping stone in develop the usable MIC in the future.
2. Literature Review Islamic content on mobile platform has emerged along with the development of mobile technology to bringing the portability, any where and anytime access. Even the mobile Islamic content application can be found in the market but the study about users’ awareness and usage of the content is hardly found. The study about users’ awareness and usage is important to see the pattern of mobile Islamic content that is applicable in the market and figure out the users’ interest. From the study, the gap of differences between the popular Islamic apps and the unseen Islamic apps can be known. Furthermore, unseen Islamic apps can be improved and put some added value for users. A. Users’ awareness and usage Oxford’s dictionary describes awareness as “concern about and well –informed interest in a particular situation or development”. Webster’s dictionary defines awareness as “having or showing realization, perception or knowledge”. The idea of awareness emerged in the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) (Rogers, 1995 frm Dinev & Hu,2007) .The theory of innovation diffusion involves an organization that will adopt the new technology and users who will use the technology. Awareness is defined as the extent to which a target population is conscious of an innovation and formulates a general perception of what it involves (Dinev & Hu, 2007). The technology awareness in this study involved the user who will use the mobile Islamic content; the techno-spiritual content on mobile platform. Webster’s dictionary describes usage as “the action, amount, or mode of using”. Oxford’s dictionary defines usage as “the action of using something or the fact of being used”. Thru usage study, the research can figure out types of activity regarding the mobile Islamic content. B. Islamic Content on Mobile The embark of mobile technology in current life, the portability of the platform like PDA, mobile phone, and smart phone with web enabled have given the chances for developer to disseminate the knowledge through the mobile platforms. The technology of Islamic content on mobile begins with the most inspiring Muslim electronic devices, the IIkone i800 that introduced in 2004; described as “the first fully Islamic Mobile Phone” (Wyche, Caine & et.al, 2008). The IIkone i800 provided the Adzan, prayer times, searchable text of the Qur’an, converts dates to and from the Hajri (Islamic) Calendar. Pacing with the era and technology, the Islamic apps offering the Qibla direction (prayer direction towards Mecca), selection of supplications (du’a or prayers), iHadith that provide a complete database of collected hadith, the du’a for minor pilgrimage(umrah) and ‘Halal Food Guide for Mobile Phones’ and Islamic Hotline (Bunt, 2010). In addition there is a research conducted regarding the mobile dictionary application for Hajj pilgrimage in order to assist the pilgrim performs their Hajj easily by providing sufficient information supported with the images and illustration (Zeki,Alsafi & et.al,2012). As mobile application rapidly conquering the mobile users, many developers push the technology to the market including the Islamic apps. Trends of techno-spiritual content especially in Islamic apps start to grow since 2004. However the scope in Islamic content on mobile still beyond expectation compared to the entertainment and games app. Moreover, the studies of users’ awareness and usage of mobile Islamic content was hardly found. Therefore, the study suggest an assessment model of mobile Islamic content (MIC) that was divided into four major components such as awareness, usage, information organization and screen display as in Figure 1. The instrument to measure the proposed MICAP model has 81 items. However, for this article the
explanation will just cover two out of four components; awareness and usage of mobile Islamic content.
Awareness Mobile
Usage Perception
Islamic Content
Information Organization Screen Display
Figure. 1. The Construction Model of Mobile Islamic Content
3. Methods A. Sample and Data Collection Based on the construction model of MIC, the instrument was created to collect data by hand, e-mail and face to face using questionnaire. The sample was taken from Muslim follower around Klang Valley area consisting of education, media and engineering sector who own mobile phone .The sample were given to 99 person but only 77 respondent give feedback. The instrument consists of six pages long with 81 items. The instrument used three types of scale such as combination of dichotomous (Yes or No), multiple choices and Likert style from 1 - 5 (strongly agree - strongly disagree). Data gathered from the instruments were analyzed using Rasch analysis with the help of Winsteps software (Linacre, 2010). B. Validity of Instrument Construct A valid test is a test which measures what is intended to measure (Kelly, 1927 from, Baghaei, 2011). Content, criterion-related and construct validity is crucial in getting the sufficient result of the study (Baghaei, 2011). For the users’ awareness and usage, model is constructed based on the several instrument related (Ghose & Han,2009; Fahad, 2009; Yan et.al, 2008; Uzunboylu et.al, 2008; Nasir, Hassan & et.al,2008) and being adapted suitable with the study of mobile Islamic content. An ordinal data which is qualitative can be transform into ratio data using Rasch model which represents accurate contextual result for achieving sufficient result. However, before using Rasch analysis, a content validity is done by two lecturers in higher institution and two psychometric experts to validate the instrument. C. Rasch Measurement Model Rasch model is used to analyze the data in this research by using the Winstep software (Linacre, 2010). This approach has been used by other researcher in analyzing the data (Azrilah,2010; Kassim et.al,2010;Aliman,2012).The probabilistic mathematical model was constructed by Danish mathematician and statistician; George Rasch for the transformation of ordinal observations into linear measures. Rasch analysis apply the regression approach and demonstrates the best fit line that fit with the points as best as possible. After that, it can be used to create the required predictions by interpolation or extrapolation (Azrilah, 2010) as shown in Figure 2. In gaining the best fit line, dissimilarity between the real point yi and the predicted ýi, is shown as error e.
Figure. 2. Best Fit Line-Linear Regression Model
Facing the fact that there is always error engaged in the prediction model, the deterministic model of equation can be transformed into probabilistic model by incorporating the prediction error into the equation. ln [P(ϴ)] = βn – δi
(1)
The expression termed logit (ln [P(ϴ)] where P(ϴ) is the probability of a successful response xni being produced by Person n to item i ) can be concluded simply by the differences of person ability (βn) and the item difficulty (δi) which is represented in Equation (1) above (Aliman et.al,2012).The equation is simplified from previous research (Bond, 2007 and Azrilah,2010). The model concentrates on building up the reliable measurement instrument rather than forcing data to fit to the measurement model (Bond, 2007). The Rasch model calculated person and item measurement with logit values as unit of measurement thus resulting in a linear construct and can be plotted on one scale ruler as shown in Figure 2.
4. Results The Rasch measurement model using Winstep software can generate many important output tables such as summary statistics, unidimensionality, and person item measure to be used for explanations of result. A. Summary Statistics There were 5759 data points that exist from 77 respondents on 79 items (eliminate 2 item from 81 for maximum and minimum extreme score).The data points was analysed and produce the Chi-Square value of 4430.01 with 5626 degree of freedom. The raw score test Cronbach-α yield a high reliability of 0.93(93%) which allows further analysis of the instrument in measuring users’ awareness and usage for mobile Islamic content.
MEAN S.D. MAX. MIN.
TOTAL SCORE
COUNT
MEASURE
MODEL ERROR
65.3 36.9 157.0 34.0
77.1 3.8 79.0 54.0
-1.27 1.25 1.11 -4.31
.31 .13 .65 .12
REAL RMSE .34 TRUE SD MODEL RMSE .33 TRUE SD S.E. OF Person MEAN = .14
1.21 1.21
SEPARATION SEPARATION
INFIT MNSQ ZSTD
OUTFIT MNSQ ZSTD
.75 .28 1.55 .33
.87 .66 2.94 .14
3.58 3.66
-.7 1.0 1.9 -3.8
Person RELIABILITY Person RELIABILITY
.0 1.1 3.4 -1.6 .93 .93
Figure. 3. Summary of Measured 77 Person
The instrument has quite a small measurement model error of +/-0.32 logit and capable of producing a good person separation of 3.58 as shown in Figure 3. It shows that the item is quite good where it is able to separate person (respondent) into about 4 groups of mobile phone users. However the Infit MNSQ SD=0.28 logit of measured person is little bit low when values less than 1.0 indicate that the scrutiny of the questionnaire are expected where they might be some redundancy of the questionnaire and data overfit the model (Azrilah,2010) and z-std SD=1.0 logit shows data in this questionnaire have reasonable predictability (Linacre,2002). Both items and person Infit MNSQ and z-std values is approaching to the ideal 1 and 0 correspondingly giving sign that the instrument is fit in measuring the users’ awareness and usage in the theory of validity. TOTAL SCORE
COUNT
MEAN 64.3 75.1 S.D. 56.2 4.0 MAX. 217.0 77.0 MIN. 1.0 55.0 REAL RMSE .38 TRUE SD MODEL RMSE .37 TRUE SD S.E. OF Item MEAN = .20
MEASURE
MODEL ERROR
.00 .32 1.73 .18 3.80 1.02 -6.27 0.15 1.69 SEPARATION 1.70 SEPARATION
INFIT MNSQ ZSTD
OUTFIT MNSQ ZSTD
.88 -.3 .85 .2 .40 1.9 .70 1.3 2.29 5.5 3.60 4.9 .21 -4.2 .08 -1.1 4.47 Item RELIABILITY .95 4.63 Item RELIABILITY .96
Figure. 4. Summary of Measured 79 Items
Figure 4 shows a high item reliability of 0.95(95%) showing sufficiency of item range. It indicates that there are enough items in this questionnaire to measure the users’ awareness and usage on MIC. However, the Person Mean;µ=-1.27 logit seems like users lack of awareness in MIC and the further research has to be proceed and carried out. The maximum Item measure is +3.80logit (SE: 1.02) as compared to maximum Person ability stands at low +1.11logit (SE: 0.65). The difference of 2.69 logit between Item and Person maximum (3.80 – 1.11) shows that this questionnaire has insufficient difficult items. Nevertheless, there are sufficient items for the easy task where minimum Item measure is at -6.27logit against the min mobile phone user is at -4.31 logit. B. Unidimensionality Unidimensionality is a fundamental theory in systematic measurement that one attributes of an object (eg.temperature, width, length) be calculated at a time (Bond, 2007). Rasch analysis applies the Principle Component Analysis (PCA) of the residuals; i.e. how much variance is the instrument in measuring what is supposedly to be measured. The raw variance explained by measured is 80.9% quite matched the expected 71.9%. Besides it meets unidimensionality requirement minimum of 20 %( Reckase, 79), minimum cut off Rasch 40% (Conrad, 2011) is highly achieved. Thus, the unexplained variance in the 1st contrast of good 3.1% is
obtained as shown in Figure 5. It shows that in 80.9% item in the questionnaire, only 3.1% of the item that distorted the measurements; means there are some items exist like questions for Communication (SMS and Calls) in the questionnaire that did not measure the objectives but with minimal effect. Total raw variance in observations Raw variance explained by measures Raw variance explained by persons Raw Variance explained by items Raw unexplained variance (total) Unexplained variance in 1st contrast
= = = = = =
-- Empirical -Modeled 403.9 100.0% 100.0% 326.9 80.9% 71.9% 245.4 60.8% 54.0% 81.5 20.2% 17.9% 77.0 19.1% 100.0% 28.1% 12.6 3.1% 16.4%
Figure. 5. Standardized Residual Variance (in Eigenvalue units)
C. Person Item Map for Awareness and Usage Person Item Map will display the pattern of persons and items measured where the value for item represent difficulty level and the value of person represent capability. Figure 6 and Figure 7 is the Person Item Map for both Usage and Awareness domain for this pilot study. Based on the usage of mobile phone (Figure 6), it shows that usage for Communication (B51_a_Chatting), Social Community (B54_b_Twitter and B54_c_MySpace), Entertainment (B53_e_Television), Information Search (B56_e_Journal, B56_b_e-Government, B56_g_Publication, B56_c_e-Magazine and B56_a_Islamic Content) and Online Services (B52_a_Purchasing, B52_b_Ticketing, B52_c_Payment and B52_d_Banking) are Person Free which means item seldom used. While item for Communication (B51_b_SMS and B51_a_Calls) were not measuring and no need to ask by the respondents as previously mentioned in Section B.
Figure. 6. Person Item Map – Usage Pattern
The result of Awareness domain (Figure 7) shows that respondents were not aware of available M-Seerah and did not use Mobile Seerah application even some of them know that M_Seerah is provided. The respondent also did not use the M_Seerah,M_Hadith,M_Adzan and M-Qiblah even they aware of its existence.
Figure. 7. Person Item Map – Awareness Pattern
5. Discussion Eventhough, this was only a pilot study but the result had shown tremendous output where the reliability for Items and Person is 0.95 and 0.93 respectively, when the minimum cut off is 0.7 for Cronbach- α. In addition, the raw variance explained by measured is 80.9% highly achieved, and meets unidimensionality requirement when minimum cut off Rasch is only 40% (Conrad, 2011). The raw score test Cronbach-α yield a high reliability which allows further analysis of the instrument in measuring users’ awareness and usage for mobile Islamic content. The finding showed that there was a big gap exists among Mobile Quran and Mobile Seerah usage for Muslims user. The big gap can be a significant issue to proceed with the Mobile Seerah research in the future. Other findings showed that user were interested mostly towards entertainment and communication purposes that related mostly with multimedia elements. Thus items like Islamic content that was seldom used by the respondents should implement the approach of using multimedia elements to attract the user to browse the
Islamic content as entertainment application. The study also found the surprising finding, eventhough the application of mobile Islamic content like Seerah is available to the mobile users but the percentage of the usage was very low. Thus, we can conclude in this study that awareness of MIC like M_Seerah is not the main factor for the user to use this MIC in their daily life.
6. Conclusion The results have shown that awareness towards MIC is not the factors contributing towards the usage of the MIC. Furthermore the pattern of mobile phone usage has showed that Muslims’ user interested towards entertainment application that related mostly with multimedia elements. Further analysis of MIC content and layout of the interface shall take place in the future to find the factors that might influence the usage of the MIC. Future work will implement the multimedia elements on MIC for attracting user to use the mobile Islamic content application.
Acknowledgement The researchers would like to thank the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (MOHE) for funding this project and also to the Research Management Institute of UiTM for the assistance. Gratitude also is given to those who have supported this research directly and indirectly. Special thanks to Mrs.Sharifah Aliman for helping in Rasch model.
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