The Role of Item Distributions on Reliability Estimation: The Case of Cronbach's Coefficient Alpha.
classical test theory
coefficient alpha
item distribution
reliability theory
Journal
Educational and psychological measurement
ISSN: 1552-3888
Titre abrégé: Educ Psychol Meas
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 0372767
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
Oct 2020
Oct 2020
Historique:
entrez:
29
8
2020
pubmed:
29
8
2020
medline:
29
8
2020
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
Simulations concerning the distributional assumptions of coefficient alpha are contradictory. To provide a more principled theoretical framework, this article relies on the Fréchet-Hoeffding bounds, in order to showcase that the distribution of the items play a role on the estimation of correlations and covariances. More specifically, these bounds restrict the theoretical correlation range [-1, 1] such that certain correlation structures may be unfeasible. The direct implication of this result is that coefficient alpha is bounded above depending on the shape of the distributions. A general form of the Fréchet-Hoeffding bounds is derived for discrete random variables.
Identifiants
pubmed: 32855561
doi: 10.1177/0013164420903770
pii: 10.1177_0013164420903770
pmc: PMC7425331
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Pagination
825-846Informations de copyright
© The Author(s) 2020.
Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts
Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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