Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Getting Started
- Part I Why We Use Statistics
- Part II How to Use Statistics
- 5 Planning Your Statistical Analysis
- 6 A Cautionary Tail: Why You Should Not Do a One-Tailed Test
- 7 Is This Normal?
- 8 Sorting Out Outliers
- 9 Power and Two Types of Error
- 10 Using Non-Parametric Tests
- 11 A Robust t-Test
- 12 The ANOVA Family and Friends
- 13 Exploring, Over-Testing and Fishing
- 14 When Is a Correlation Not a Correlation?
- 15 What Makes a Good Likert Item?
- 16 The Meaning of Factors
- 17 Unreliable Reliability: The Problem of Cronbach’s Alpha
- 18 Tests for Questionnaires
- Index
17 - Unreliable Reliability: The Problem of Cronbach’s Alpha
from Part II - How to Use Statistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2019
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Getting Started
- Part I Why We Use Statistics
- Part II How to Use Statistics
- 5 Planning Your Statistical Analysis
- 6 A Cautionary Tail: Why You Should Not Do a One-Tailed Test
- 7 Is This Normal?
- 8 Sorting Out Outliers
- 9 Power and Two Types of Error
- 10 Using Non-Parametric Tests
- 11 A Robust t-Test
- 12 The ANOVA Family and Friends
- 13 Exploring, Over-Testing and Fishing
- 14 When Is a Correlation Not a Correlation?
- 15 What Makes a Good Likert Item?
- 16 The Meaning of Factors
- 17 Unreliable Reliability: The Problem of Cronbach’s Alpha
- 18 Tests for Questionnaires
- Index
Summary
Cronbach's alpha is often used as a key measure of reliability in questionnaires developed in HCI. However, the state-of-the-art literature on Cronbach's alpha shows that it is itself not a reliable measure. This chapter demonstrates the problems and leads to a more nuanced interpretation of reliability, using both Cronbach's alpha and other more modern alternatives.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Doing Better Statistics in Human-Computer Interaction , pp. 204 - 213Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019