IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/psycho/v74y2009i1p107-120.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On the Use, the Misuse, and the Very Limited Usefulness of Cronbach’s Alpha

Author

Listed:
  • Klaas Sijtsma

Abstract

No abstract is available for this item.

Suggested Citation

  • Klaas Sijtsma, 2009. "On the Use, the Misuse, and the Very Limited Usefulness of Cronbach’s Alpha," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 74(1), pages 107-120, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:psycho:v:74:y:2009:i:1:p:107-120
    DOI: 10.1007/s11336-008-9101-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11336-008-9101-0
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11336-008-9101-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cyril Hoyt, 1941. "Test reliability estimated by analysis of variance," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 6(3), pages 153-160, June.
    2. Kentaro Hayashi & Akihito Kamata, 2005. "A note on the estimator of the alpha coefficient for standardized variables under normality," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 70(3), pages 579-586, September.
    3. Jos Berge & Gregor Sočan, 2004. "The greatest lower bound to the reliability of a test and the hypothesis of unidimensionality," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 69(4), pages 613-625, December.
    4. Frederic Lord, 1960. "An empirical study of the normality and independence of errors of measurement in test scores," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 25(1), pages 91-104, March.
    5. Alexander Shapiro & Jos Berge, 2000. "The asymptotic bias of minimum trace factor analysis, with applications to the greatest lower bound to reliability," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 65(3), pages 413-425, September.
    6. Yoshio Takane & Jan Leeuw, 1987. "On the relationship between item response theory and factor analysis of discretized variables," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 393-408, September.
    7. Denny Borsboom, 2006. "The attack of the psychometricians," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 71(3), pages 425-440, September.
    8. Emily Kistner & Keith Muller, 2004. "Exact distributions of intraclass correlation and Cronbach's alpha with Gaussian data and general covariance," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 69(3), pages 459-474, September.
    9. P. Bentler & J. Woodward, 1980. "Inequalities among lower bounds to reliability: With applications to test construction and factor analysis," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 45(2), pages 249-267, June.
    10. Lee Cronbach, 1988. "Internal consistency of tests: Analyses old and new," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 53(1), pages 63-70, March.
    11. Melvin Novick & Charles Lewis, 1967. "Coefficient alpha and the reliability of composite measurements," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 32(1), pages 1-13, March.
    12. Brian Woodhouse & Paul Jackson, 1977. "Lower bounds for the reliability of the total score on a test composed of non-homogeneous items: II: A search procedure to locate the greatest lower bound," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 42(4), pages 579-591, December.
    13. Jos Berge & Tom Snijders & Frits Zegers, 1981. "Computational aspects of the greatest lower bound to the reliability and constrained minimum trace factor analysis," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 46(2), pages 201-213, June.
    14. Jos Berge & Henk Kiers, 1991. "A numerical approach to the approximate and the exact minimum rank of a covariance matrix," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 56(2), pages 309-315, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Tyler Hunt & Peter Bentler, 2015. "Quantile Lower Bounds to Reliability Based on Locally Optimal Splits," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 80(1), pages 182-195, March.
    2. Peter M. Bentler, 2021. "Alpha, FACTT, and Beyond," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 86(4), pages 861-868, December.
    3. Klaas Sijtsma & Julius M. Pfadt, 2021. "Part II: On the Use, the Misuse, and the Very Limited Usefulness of Cronbach’s Alpha: Discussing Lower Bounds and Correlated Errors," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 86(4), pages 843-860, December.
    4. Jos Berge & Willem Hofstee, 1999. "Coefficients alpha and reliabilities of unrotated and rotated components," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 64(1), pages 83-90, March.
    5. Bai, Jushan & Ng, Serena, 2019. "Rank regularized estimation of approximate factor models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 212(1), pages 78-96.
    6. Alexander Shapiro & Jos Berge, 2000. "The asymptotic bias of minimum trace factor analysis, with applications to the greatest lower bound to reliability," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 65(3), pages 413-425, September.
    7. Klaas Sijtsma, 2012. "Future of Psychometrics: Ask What Psychometrics Can Do for Psychology," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 77(1), pages 4-20, January.
    8. Jos Berge & Gregor Sočan, 2004. "The greatest lower bound to the reliability of a test and the hypothesis of unidimensionality," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 69(4), pages 613-625, December.
    9. David J. Hessen, 2017. "Lower Bounds to the Reliabilities of Factor Score Estimators," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 82(3), pages 648-659, September.
    10. Peter Bentler, 2009. "Alpha, Dimension-Free, and Model-Based Internal Consistency Reliability," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 74(1), pages 137-143, March.
    11. Jushan Bai & Serena Ng, 2017. "Principal Components and Regularized Estimation of Factor Models," Papers 1708.08137, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2017.
    12. Ogasawara, Haruhiko, 2023. "The density of the sample correlations under elliptical symmetry with or without the truncated variance-ratio," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 195(C).
    13. Ke-Hai Yuan & Peter Bentler, 2002. "On robusiness of the normal-theory based asymptotic distributions of three reliability coefficient estimates," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 67(2), pages 251-259, June.
    14. Zhengguo Gu & Wilco H. M. Emons & Klaas Sijtsma, 2021. "Estimating Difference-Score Reliability in Pretest–Posttest Settings," Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, , vol. 46(5), pages 592-610, October.
    15. Eunseong Cho, 2021. "Neither Cronbach’s Alpha nor McDonald’s Omega: A Commentary on Sijtsma and Pfadt," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 86(4), pages 877-886, December.
    16. Tarkkonen, L. & Vehkalahti, K., 2005. "Measurement errors in multivariate measurement scales," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 96(1), pages 172-189, September.
    17. Massimiliano Pastore & Luigi Lombardi, 2014. "The impact of faking on Cronbach’s alpha for dichotomous and ordered rating scores," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 1191-1211, May.
    18. Alexander Shapiro & Jos Berge, 2002. "Statistical inference of minimum rank factor analysis," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 67(1), pages 79-94, March.
    19. Peter M. Bentler, 2016. "Covariate-free and Covariate-dependent Reliability," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 81(4), pages 907-920, December.
    20. Nebojsa S. Davcik, 2013. "The Use And Misuse Of Structural Equation Modeling In Management Research," Working Papers Series 2 13-07, ISCTE-IUL, Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:psycho:v:74:y:2009:i:1:p:107-120. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.