Treating Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability Coefficients as Data in Counseling Research

Abstract

Scientific associations and measurement experts in psychology and education have voiced various standards and best-practice recommendations concerning reliability data over the years. Yet in the counseling psychology literature, there is virtually no single-source compilation and articulation of good practices for reporting, analyzing, and interpreting reliability to guide applied researchers intending to use scales rather than develop them. Therefore, focusing on Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency reliability estimates, this article (a) defines and provides rationales for seven broad categories of good practices for reporting, analyzing, interpreting, and using reliability data and (b) illustrates some pragmatic strategies for implementing the good practices with respect to reliability data in quantitative studies involving already-developed scales. The authors’ recommendations for good rather than best practices acknowledge that additional or alternative practices may be required when scale development is the researcher’s focus. The authors summarize their good practices in tabular form.