Cronbach's Alpha () using SPSS

Statistics
Introduction
Cronbach's alpha is the most common measure of internal consistency
("reliability"). It is most commonly used when you have multiple Likert
questions in a survey/questionnaire that form a scale and you wish to
determine if the scale is reliable. If you are concerned with inter-rater
reliability, we also have a guide on using Cohen's () kappa that you might find
useful.
The eight steps below show you how to check for internal consistency using
Cronbach's alpha in SPSS Statistics. At the end of these eight steps, we show
you how to interpret the results from your Cronbach's alpha.

Click Analyze > Scale > Reliability Analysis... on the top menu, as shown
below:

You will be presented with the Reliability Analysis dialogue box, as shown
below:
.

Transfer the variables Qu1 to Qu9 into the Items: box. You can do this by dragand-dropping the variables into their respective boxes or by using the
will be presented with the following screen:

button. You

Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

Leave the Model: set as "Alpha", which represents Cronbach's alpha in SPSS
Statistics. If you want to provide a name for the scale, enter it in the Scale label: box.
Since this only prints the name you enter at the top of the SPSS Statistics output, it is
certainly not essential that you do (in our example, we leave it blank).

Click on the

button, which will open the Reliability Analysis:

Statistics dialogue box, as shown below:

Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

Select the Item, Scale and Scale if item deleted options in the Descriptives for area,
and the Correlations option in the Inter-Item area, as shown below:

Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

Click the

button. This will return you to the Reliability

Analysis dialogue box.

Click the

button to generate the output.

SPSS Statistics Output for Cronbach's Alpha

SPSS Statistics produces many different tables. The first important table is
the Reliability Statistics table that provides the actual value for Cronbach's
alpha, as shown below:

Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

From our example, we can see that Cronbach's alpha is 0.805, which
indicates a high level of internal consistency for our scale with this specific
sample.

SPSS Statisticstop ^

Item-Total Statistics
The Item-Total Statistics table presents the "Cronbach's Alpha if Item
Deleted" in the final column, as shown below:

Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

This column presents the value that Cronbach's alpha would be if that
particular item was deleted from the scale. We can see that removal of any
question, except question 8, would result in a lower Cronbach's alpha.
Therefore, we would not want to remove these questions. Removal of

question 8 would lead to a small improvement in Cronbach's alpha, and we

can also see that the "Corrected Item-Total Correlation" value was low
(0.128) for this item. This might lead us to consider whether we should remove
this item.
Cronbach's alpha simply provides you with an overall reliability coefficient for
a set of variables (e.g., questions). If your questions reflect different underlying
personal qualities (or other dimensions), for example, employee motivation
and employee commitment, Cronbach's alpha will not be able to distinguish
between these. In order to do this and then check their reliability (using
Cronbach's alpha), you will first need to run a test such as a principal
components analysis (PCA). You can learn how to carry out principal
components analysis (PCA) using SPSS Statistics, as well as interpret and
write up your results, in our enhanced content. You can learn more here. It is
also possible to run Cronbach's alpha in Minitab.