Reliability Module
I would like to thank the team for providing a superb open-source program. The students and I are grateful.
“Unidimensional reliability” is indicated (in versions after 0.14) in module for assessing reliability which I hope that the team would consider changing. I am of the opinion that it is misleading as reliability does not assess unidimensionality. "internal consistency" could be an alternative.
Comments
We're discussing it, thanks for the suggestion
E.J.
Hi @hongenggoh,
thanks for the suggestion indeed. What you touch upon is quite a controversial topic among researchers. It is of course correct that reliability is no quantification of unidimensionality. The term "Unidimensional Reliability" is short for "Reliability for unidimensional data", which distinguishes that analysis from the forthcoming "multidimensional reliability", and is supposed to convince researchers to only use these coefficients for approx. unidimensional data. On the contrary, the term "internal consistency" indicates that the analysis says something about the internal structure of the data, which is, of course, incorrect. The same observation has been made by Sijtsma (2009), who suggests separating coefficients such as alpha from internal consistency, and best forgetting the term altogether.
Julius