Statistical Comparison of the Cronbach´s Alpha Reliability: Applications in the Educational and Psychological Measurement
Abstract
This report presents an introductory exhibition on the coefficient alpha (Cronbach,
1951), and the additional analyses that can be made from an hypothesis testing
approach with this statistics. This test hypothesis is based on finding out if the
differences among the alpha coefficients obtained from dependent or independent
samples are statistically significant. For this end, one of the authors (Lautenschlager, 1989) have created a program, ALPHATST, which is very useful to calculate and obtain the necessary information that allows the investigator to solve the question “are the alpha coefficients found in dependent or independent samples significantly different?“. We show some examples on the use of this approach as well as of their potential applications in the educational context
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