Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability Analysis
Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability analysis is used to study the properties of measurement scales (Likert scale questionnaire) and the items (questions) that make them up. The reliability analysis method computes several commonly used measures of scale reliability. The reliability analysis also provides information about the relationships between individual items in the scale. The intraclass correlation coefficients can be used to compute the interrater reliability estimates.
Consider that you want to know if my questionnaire measures customer satisfaction in a useful way. For this purpose, you can use the reliability analysis to determine the extent to which the items (questions) in your questionnaire are correlated with each other. The overall index of the reliability or internal consistency of the scale as a whole can be obtained. You can also identify problematic items that should be removed (deleted) from the scale.
As an example open the data “satisf.save” already available in SPSS sample files. To check the reliability of Likert scale items follow the steps given below:
Step 1: On the Menu bar of SPSS, Click Analyze > Scale > Reliability Analysis… option
Step 2: Select two more variables that you want to test and shift them from the left pan to the right pan of the reliability analysis dialogue box. Note, that multiple variables (items) can be selected by holding down the CTRL key and clicking the variable you want. Clicking the arrow button between the left and right pan will shift the variables to the item pan (right pan).
Step 3: Click on the “Statistics” Button to select some other statistics such as descriptives (for item, scale, and scale if item deleted), summaries (for means, variances, covariances, and correlations), inter-item (for correlations and covariances) and ANOVA table (for none, F-test, Friedman chi-square and Cochran chi-square) statistics etc.
Click on the “Continue” button to save the current statistics options for analysis. Click the OK button in the Reliability Analysis dialogue box to get the analysis to be done on selected items. The output will be shown in SPSS output windows.
The Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability ($\alpha$) is about 0.827, which is good enough. Note that, deleting the item “organization satisfaction” will increase the reliability of remaining items to 0.860.
A rule of thumb for interpreting alpha for dichotomous items (questions with two possible answers only) or Likert scale items (questions with 3, 5, 7, or 9, etc items) is:
- If Cronbach’s Alpha is $\ge 0.9$, the internal consistency of scale is Excellent.
- If Cronbach’s Alpha is $0.90 > \alpha \ge 0.8$, the internal consistency of scale is Good.
- If Cronbach’s Alpha is $0.80 > \alpha \ge 0.7$, the internal consistency of scale is Acceptable.
- If Cronbach’s Alpha is $0.70 > \alpha \ge 0.6$, the internal consistency of scale is Questionable.
- If Cronbach’s Alpha is $0.60 > \alpha \ge 0.5$, the internal consistency of scale is Poor.
- If Cronbach’s Alpha is $0.50 > \alpha $, the internal consistency of scale is Unacceptable.
However, the rules of thumb listed above should be used with caution since Cronbach’s Alpha reliability is sensitive to the number of items in a scale. A larger number of questions can result in a larger Alpha Reliability, while a smaller number of items may result in smaller $\alpha$.
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