محمود دهقان

With the considerable increase in academic publications and ever-growing concern for academic writing, academic literacy, and plagiarism in recent years, investigating academic writers’ ‘authorial identity’ and ‘authorial voice’ has been of utmost importance in academic milieu. The main purposes of this study were achieved by going through four main phases including 1) hypothesizing a model of authorial identity in Iran, 2) developing and validating a questionnaire based on the model, 3) testing the model based on the questionnaire data, and 4) searching for possible significant differences between Iranian male and female graduate students’ authorial identity. In this study, there were 30 respondents for the initial piloting, 60 for the reliability phase, 100 for the exploratory factor analysis, 175 for confirmatory factor analysis, and 120 for the final administration. First, a model of authorial identity was developed based on Ivanic’s (1998) model who considered autobiographical self, discoursal self, and self as author as the main aspects of authorial identity. Second, to develop and validate the questionnaire based on the new model, we went through a number of stages namely, item pool generation, piloting, reliability estimation and validation. The reliability of the questionnaire estimated through Cronbach’s alpha was 0.73. Accordingly, exploratory factor analysis identified a latent model with four factors, viz. authorial voice and identity, authorial role, authorial background, and authorial style. Third, in the confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling using AMOS was employed to test the model and the results showed that the four-factor model was fit. Finally, the results of the independent sample t-test revealed no significant difference between Iranian male and female graduate students’ authorial identity. This model can be used in research and pedagogical settings to help academic writers improve their authorial identity.