RELIABILITY TESTING: CRONBACH'S

ALPHA
USING SPSS

KMF 2014 SPSS Lab

Donald Stephen

Reliability and Validity

Reliability and validity are terms that refer to the quality of the measures
used in a research study.
Reliability refers to the consistency and validity refers to the accuracy of
the measure.

In this sense, consistency means when a participant give a high score

for Q1, there is high tendency for him to give a high score for
other questions as well.

In this class we focus on internal consistency reliability (accessed with

Cronbachs Alpha). We are focusing on this topic specifically because it
is the most commonly utilized type of reliability
When to test reliability?
Reliability (and validity) are important any time you measure anything
(so basically in every research study).

Cronbach's alpha

Cronbachs alpha is the most commonly used measure of

reliability (i.e.,internal consistency).
Cronbachs alpha ranges from 0 to 1 and tells you how internally
consistent a group of items are. In other words, Cronbachs
alpha tells you the extent to which a group of items measure
the same thing (same construct: eg. Job satisfaction, english
compentency...)
The closer the value of Cronbachs alpha is to 1, the more
consistent the items in a measure. George and Mallery (2003)
provide the following rules of thumb:
> .9 Excellent,
> .8 Good,
> .7 Acceptable,
> .6 Questionable,
> .5 Poor,
< .5 Unacceptable

Other example: If a respondent expressed agreement with the

statements I love reading in English" and "I've enjoyed learning
English", and disagreement with the statement "I hate English",
this would be indicative of good internal consistency of the test.
Remember:
You must RECODE your question accordingly so that you will have
all positive (or all negative) statements. For example, Q2 is a
negative statement, while the others are positive statements-so you
will have to recode Q2.
Question tested should be in the same category/construct. For
example, Q1Q5 are about English competency.
If you don't remember how to recode your items, go to, transform
recode into different variable

Lets look at another example:

Determine the cronbach's alpha for the following:
A questionnaire is constructed to determine the satisfaction of
students in Donald's SPSS class (5-SD; 4-D; 3;N, 2-A; 1-SA):

Venue Satisfaction
1. I feel the venue of spss class is comfortable.
2. I think the sound system in the spss lab is good.
3. The computers in the lab is fast and responsive.
Syllabus Satisfaction
1. The topics are easy to follow
2. I think the topics learned are useful for assignments
3. The topics learned in the lab enhance understanding about
statistics

Steps:
1. Analyze scale reliability analysis (click on items we
want to compute) Statistics select scale and scale if item
deleted.

Be careful with the reverse coded item, you only want to include
the reverse scored version (not both).
1. Case Processing Summary- This box tells you the number of
participants in your sample that completed enough items to be
included in the analysis.
2. Reliability Statistics- This is the value of Cronbachs Alpha for
your scale.
3. Item-Total Statistics- This will appear if you click on scale if item
deleted. The cronbach's alpha if item deleted is the only part we
need to pay attention to. Remember that were looking for items
where alpha would go UP if an item was deleted. You can see that
all of our items are good items because alpha would stay the
same or go down if the item was deleted.

Now that you have compute the cronbach's alpha

for the first construct- VS(venue satisfaction),
you can proceed with the second construct- SS
(Syllabus satisfaction)
What makes a question Good or Bad in terms
of alpha?
-

SPSS and SAS will report alpha if item deleted,

which show alpha would change if that one question
was not on the test.
- Low alpha if item deleted means a question is
good because deleting that question would lower the
overall alpha.

We have two goals when we look at our output for

Cronbachs alpha.
1. Make sure that our alpha is good.
2. Make sure we dont have any bad items.
What if there's a bad item? (item that can
significantly increase alpha value)
1. Check for miscoding/ recode variable
2. If theres no coding problem, does it seem like
the item might be hard to understand?
3. Does the item measuring something different?
Sometimes, researchers delete such bad items
from the scale for the sake of higher reliability

Common mistakes:
Does not recode negative statements
Still using the data for negative statement instead
of newly recorded data.
Does not separate questions according to
construct. Example, if a questionnaire consists
of 2 constructs : job satisfaction and job
involvement, questions for both construct must
be tested separately
Miscoding
Not paying attention in lab.. (I'm kidding)

Data for note can be obtained online from

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/69500837/alpha.sav