EDUR 9131
Advanced Educational Research: Review of Basics
Activity 4: Internal Consistency
The purpose of this exercise is to develop proficiency with assessing internal consistency of a set of items. Below is a link to responses from 19 students who completed the “Dissertation Process Survey.”
Note that there are 10 items on this questionnaire. The even numbered items (2, 4, 6, 8, and 10) were designed to measure anxiety toward the dissertation process. The odd numbered items were designed to measure self-efficacy toward the dissertation process.
What to do:
(a) Calculate the internal consistency for anxiety items, and scale statistics (e.g., alpha if item removed, item-total correlations).
(b) Examine these items (carefully review wording of each item and examine item analysis statistics) and determine if any should be dropped. Explain why you dropped the item or items that you dropped.
(c) If some are dropped, recalculate internal consistency and re-examine the remaining items.
(d) Repeat these steps as necessary until the final sub-set of the items is obtained. Once the final set of items is obtained, explain why any items were removed, and interpret the alpha that was finally obtained.
(e) Repeat the process described above for the self-efficacy items.
What to submit for this exercise:
Nothing to submit; answers are provided. Compare your answers with those provided.
Let me know if you have questions.