psy (version 1.2)

cronbach: Cronbach's coefficient alpha

Description

Computes the Cronbach's reliability coefficient alpha. This coefficient may be applied to a series of items destinated to be aggregated in a single score. It estimates reliability in the framework of the domain sampling model.

Usage

cronbach(v1)

Arguments

v1

n*p matrix or dataframe, n subjects and p items

Value

A list with :

$sample.size

Number of subjects under study

$number.of.items

Number of items of the scale or questionnaire

$alpha

alpha

Details

Missing value are omitted in a "listwise" way (all items are removed even if only one of them is missing).

References

Nunnaly, J.C., Bernstein, I.H. (1994), Psychometric Theory, 3rd edition, McGraw-Hill Series in Psychology.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
data(expsy)
cronbach(expsy[,1:10])  ## not good because item 2 is reversed (1 is high and 4 is low)
cronbach(cbind(expsy[,c(1,3:10)],-1*expsy[,2]))  ## better

#to obtain a 95%confidence interval:
#datafile <- cbind(expsy[,c(1,3:10)],-1*expsy[,2])
#library(boot)
#cronbach.boot <- function(data,x) {cronbach(data[x,])[[3]]}
#res <- boot(datafile,cronbach.boot,1000)
#quantile(res$t,c(0.025,0.975))  ## two-sided bootstrapped confidence interval of Cronbach's alpha
#boot.ci(res,type="bca")         ## adjusted bootstrap percentile (BCa) confidence interval (better)
# }