Best Alternatives to Cronbach's Alpha Reliability in Realistic Conditions: Congeneric and Asymmetrical Measurements

By Ítalo Trizano-Hermosilla, Jesús M. Alvarado. Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

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The Cronbach's alpha is the most widely used method for estimating internal consistency reliability. This procedure has proved very resistant to the passage of time, even if its limitations are well documented and although there are better options as omega coefficient or the different versions of glb, with obvious advantages especially for applied research in which the ítems differ in quality or have skewed distributions. In this paper, using Monte Carlo simulation, the performance of these reliability coefficients under a one-dimensional model is evaluated in terms of skewness and no tau-equivalence. The results show that omega coefficient is always better choice than alpha and in the presence of skew items is preferable to use omega and glb coefficients even in small samples.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/150fad76217cd157db196e9d34f0c4ebc69fb027

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Citations in the corpus

Use Omega Rather than Cronbach’s Alpha for Estimating Reliability. But… (2020, background): “…the exception rather than the norm for most scales, and research has shown that when essential tau-equivalence is violated (meaning a set of items or a scale is congeneric), α estimates reliability less accurately than does ω (Green & Yang, 2009; Raykov, 1998; Trizano-Hermosilla & Alvarado, 2016).”
Your Coefficient Alpha Is Probably Wrong, but Which Coefficient Omega Is Right? A Tutorial on Using R to Obtain Better Reliability Estimates (2020, background): “489 Trizano-Hermosilla and Alvarado (2016) found that increasing levels of skewness in the univariate item distributions produced increasingly negatively biased ωu estimates, especially for short tests (i.e., six items in their study), but that item skewness caused greater bias for alpha than for…”