An Information-Theoretic Alternative to the Cronbach's Alpha Coefficient of Item Reliability

Abstract

We propose an information-theoretic alternative to the popular Cronbach alpha coefficient of reliability. Particularly suitable for contexts in which instruments are scored on a strictly nonnumeric scale, our proposed index is based on functions of the entropy of the distributions of defined on the sample space of responses. Our reliability index tracks the Cronbach alpha coefficient uniformly while offering several other advantages discussed in great details in this paper.