Cronbach’s Alpha under Insufficient Effort Responding: An Analytic Approach

Stephen W. Carden, Trevor R. Camper and Nicholas S. Holtzman
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Stephen W. Carden: Department of Mathematical Sciences, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA 30460, USA
Trevor R. Camper: Department of Mathematical Sciences, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA 30460, USA
Nicholas S. Holtzman: Department of Psychology, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA 30458, USA

Stats, 2018, vol. 2, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Surveys commonly suffer from insufficient effort responding (IER). If not accounted for, IER can cause biases and lead to false conclusions. In particular, Cronbach’s alpha has been empirically observed to either deflate or inflate due to IER. This paper will elucidate how IER impacts Cronbach’s alpha in a variety of situations. Previous results concerning internal consistency under mixture models are extended to obtain a characterization of Cronbach’s alpha in terms of item validities, average variances, and average covariances. The characterization is then applied to contaminating distributions representing various types of IER. The discussion will provide commentary on previous simulation-based investigations, confirming some previous hypotheses for the common types of IER, but also revealing possibilities from newly considered responding patterns. Specifically, it is possible that the bias can change from negative to positive (and vice versa) as the proportion of contamination increases.

Keywords: careless responses; insufficient effort responses; Cronbach’s alpha; internal consistency; reliability; mixture; commingled samples (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C10 C11 C14 C15 C16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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