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Research Article Open access CC BY 4.0

An Information-Theoretic Alternative to the Cronbach's Alpha Coecient of Item Reliability

E. Fokoué, N. Gündüz

Journal of Advances in Mathematics and Computer Science · pp. 1–9 · Published 2 Mar 2016

10.9734/BJMCS/2016/23944

Abstract

We propose an information-theoretic alternative to the popular Cronbach alpha coefficient of item reliability. Particularly suitable for contexts in which instruments are scored on a strictly nonnumeric and non ordinal scale, our proposed index is based on functions of the entropy of the empirical distributions defined on the sample space of responses. Our proposed reliability index tracks the Cronbach alpha coefficient uniformly while offering several other advantages discussed in great details in this paper.

Cronbach's alpha coefficient entropy Likert scale item reliability distance uncertainty variation of information probability internal data consistency

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