In: Statistics and Probability
True or False Low levels of internal consistency are better as they demonstrate that the scale has individual questions addressing all the areas of interest for the researcher, explain
.As it is based on inter-term correlation and item based correlation , it takes all the reviews to give conclusion. Individual question arises non-respondants ar misinformation biases which lead a wrong decision.
Two simple measures of internal consistency are most useful for tests made up of multiple items covering the same topic, of similar difficulty, and that will be scored as a composite: the average inter-item correlation and the average item-total correlation. To calculate the average inter-item correlation, you find the correlation between each pair of items and take the average of all these correlations. To calculate the average item-total correlation, you create a total score by adding up scores on each individual item on the scale and then compute the correlation of each item with the total. The average item-total correlation is the average of those individual item-total correlations.Split-half reliability, described previously, is another method of determining internal consistency. This method has the disadvantage that, if the items are not truly homogeneous, different splits will create forms of disparate difficulty, and the reliability coefficient will be different for each pair of forms. A method that overcomes this difficulty is Cronbach’s alpha (also called coefficient alpha), which is equivalent to the average of all possible split-half estimates