If you use an old bathroom scale to weigh yourself and step on and off it a few times, you’ll probably get different readings, even within seconds. These measurements of your weight (more correctly, your mass, but I’ll stay with weight) vary randomly. But they shouldn’t. Unfortunately, old bathroom scales produce weights that are not …
Lessons from an old bathroom scale on measurement reliability Read More »
Over the past few weeks, I’ve read a few dissertations in their draft forms. They had several challenges in common. Let’s examine five mistakes they made, and how to fix them. 1. The dissertations took several pages to describe the characteristics of their participants. Each demographic was described in detail with an accompanying table and …
5 Essentials to GET RIGHT in your Dissertation or Thesis Read More »
You may wonder why my sympathy for Cronbach’s Alpha (also called Coefficient Alpha). Well, it’s because alpha is one of the most frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted statistics in theses, dissertations, proposals and other academic publications involving measurement 🥲. SO, WHAT IS CRONBACH’S ALPHA? Cronbach’s alpha is a measure of the internal consistency …
One aspect of research methodology that often confuses students is the topic of reliability. This is because there are really two main types of reliability: MEASUREMENT reliability and RESEARCH reliability. These two reliabilities are very different. Measurement reliability is all about assessing the reliability or consistency of the scores of your measurement instruments. These assessments …