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Internal consistency is typically measured using Cronbach's Alpha ().

Cronbach's Alpha ranges


from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating greater internal consistency (and ultimately
reliability). Common guidelines for evaluating Cronbach's Alpha are:

.00 to .69 = Poor


.70 to .79 = Fair
.80 to .89 = Good
.90 to .99 = Excellent/Strong

if you get a value of 1.0 then you have "complete agreement" (i.e. redundancy) in your items,
so you likely need to eliminate some. Items that are in perfect agreement with each other do
not each uniquely contribute to the measurement in the construct they are intended to
measure, so they should not both be included in the scale. Occasionally, you may also see a
negative Cronbach's Alpha value, but this is usually indicative of a coding error, having too few
people in your sample (relative to the number of items in your scale), or REALLY poor internal
consistency.

If Cronbach's Alpha (i.e. internal consistency) is poor for your scale, there are a couple ways to
improve it:
1. Eliminate items that are poorly correlated with other items in your scale (i.e. "Number letters in
your last name" item in previous example)
2. Add highly reliable items to your scale (i.e. that correlate with existing items in your scale, but
are not redundant with items already in your scale)

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