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A Performance Evaluation of Confidence Intervals for Ordinal Coefficient Alpha (open access)

A Performance Evaluation of Confidence Intervals for Ordinal Coefficient Alpha

Ordinal coefficient alpha is a newly derived non-parametric reliability estimate. As with any point estimate, ordinal coefficient alpha is merely an estimate of a population parameter and tends to vary from sample to sample. Researchers report the confidence interval to provide readers with the amount of precision obtained. Several methods with differing computational approaches exist for confidence interval estimation for alpha, including the Fisher, Feldt, Bonner, and Hakstian and Whalen (HW) techniques. Overall, coverage rates for the various methods were unacceptably low with the Fisher method as the highest performer at 62%. Because of the poor performance across all four confidence interval methods, a need exists to develop a method which works well for ordinal coefficient alpha.
Date: May 2015
Creator: Turner, Heather Jean
System: The UNT Digital Library