Reliability

How reliable are the items of the LUXXprofile?

By Svenja Winkler, member of the R&D-Team at LUXXprofile.

There are news from the research area of the LUXXprofile: the motive scales and their items have been defined. Everything has been tested for its reliability, and the next step is to standardize and validate. Let us first consider reliability and its meaning.

Reliability describes the consistency or trustworthiness of a test and it is an important quality criterion. A test will show a high reliability, if there are equal or very similar results after the test was repeated under comparable circumstances. But how to ensure reliability during test construction? A crucial point for test reliability is the internal consistency, also called “Cronbach’s alpha”. It estimates the similarity in content of the items which represent the respective motive in the test. The following applies to each motive: the more similar the contents, the higher Cronbach’s alpha and the more reliable the scale value. For orientation: personality tests should have a Cronbach’s alpha round 0.80 or higher. The LUXXprofile shows an average Cronbach’s alpha of 0.81 during the current stage of development. The values of the individual scales range from a good 0.77 to an excellent 0.93. So, the deviating values are still in range of the optimal value. This means that we achieved a high level in regard to test quality. In the upcoming article, I will report on the second important quality criterion – test validity – and how the LUXXprofile has approached this.

Curious to find out more? There are two videos on YouTube explaining the internal consistency or Cronbach Alpha in detail. Just click on the links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCztXEfNJLM (Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdCdTzpZrVI (Part 2).

You can get more information on the LUXXprofile – including the motive scales and items – at the upcoming European LUXXprofile Launch Event on the 4th of May 2017 in Cologne.