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Internal Consistency
In statistics and research, internal consistency is typically a measure based on the correlations between different items on the same test (or the same subscale on a larger test). It measures whether several items that propose to measure the same general construct produce similar scores. For example, if a respondent expressed agreement with the statements "I like to ride bicycles" and "I've enjoyed riding bicycles in the past", and disagreement with the statement "I hate bicycles", this would be indicative of good internal consistency of the test. Cronbach's alpha Internal consistency is usually measured with Cronbach's alpha, a statistic calculated from the pairwise correlations between items. Internal consistency ranges between negative infinity and one. Coefficient alpha will be negative whenever there is greater within-subject variability than between-subject variability. A commonly accepted rule of thumb for describing internal consistency is as follows: Very high reliabil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistics
Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of statistical survey, surveys and experimental design, experiments. When census data (comprising every member of the target population) cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey sample (statistics), samples. Representative sampling assures that inferences and conclusions can reasonably extend from the sample ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Research
Research is creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge. It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to controlling sources of bias and error. These activities are characterized by accounting and controlling for biases. A research project may be an expansion of past work in the field. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole. The primary purposes of basic research (as opposed to applied research) are documentation, discovery, interpretation, and the research and development (R&D) of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge. Approaches to research depend on epistemologies, which vary considerably both within and between humanities and sciences. There are several forms of research: scientific, humanities, artistic, eco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Correlation
In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics it usually refers to the degree to which a pair of variables are '' linearly'' related. Familiar examples of dependent phenomena include the correlation between the height of parents and their offspring, and the correlation between the price of a good and the quantity the consumers are willing to purchase, as it is depicted in the demand curve. Correlations are useful because they can indicate a predictive relationship that can be exploited in practice. For example, an electrical utility may produce less power on a mild day based on the correlation between electricity demand and weather. In this example, there is a causal relationship, because extreme weather causes people to use more electricity for heating or cooling. However, in g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Construct (philosophy)
In philosophy, a construct is an object which is ''ideal'', that is, an object of the mind or of thought, meaning that its existence may be said to depend upon a subject's mind. This contrasts with any possibly ''mind-independent'' objects, the existence of which purportedly does not depend on the existence of a conscious observing subject. Thus, the distinction between these two terms may be compared to that between phenomenon and noumenon in other philosophical contexts and to many of the typical definitions of the terms realism and idealism also. In the correspondence theory of truth, ideas, such as constructs, are to be judged and checked according to how well they correspond with their referents, often conceived as part of a ''mind-independent'' reality. Overview As mind-dependent objects, concepts that are typically viewed as constructs include the abstract objects designated by such symbols as 3 or 4, or words such as liberty or cold as they are seen as a result of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistic
A statistic (singular) or sample statistic is any quantity computed from values in a sample which is considered for a statistical purpose. Statistical purposes include estimating a population parameter, describing a sample, or evaluating a hypothesis. The average (or mean) of sample values is a statistic. The term statistic is used both for the function (e.g., a calculation method of the average) and for the value of the function on a given sample (e.g., the result of the average calculation). When a statistic is being used for a specific purpose, it may be referred to by a name indicating its purpose. When a statistic is used for estimating a population parameter, the statistic is called an '' estimator''. A population parameter is any characteristic of a population under study, but when it is not feasible to directly measure the value of a population parameter, statistical methods are used to infer the likely value of the parameter on the basis of a statistic computed from a s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cronbach's Alpha
Cronbach's alpha (Cronbach's \alpha), also known as tau-equivalent reliability (\rho_T) or coefficient alpha (coefficient \alpha), is a reliability coefficient and a measure of the internal consistency of tests and measures. It was named after the American psychologist Lee Cronbach. Numerous studies warn against using Cronbach's alpha unconditionally. Statisticians regard reliability coefficients based on structural equation modeling (SEM) or generalizability theory as superior alternatives in many situations. History In his initial 1951 publication, Lee Cronbach described the coefficient as ''Coefficient'' ''alpha'' and included an additional derivation. ''Coefficient alpha'' had been used implicitly in previous studies, but his interpretation was thought to be more intuitively attractive relative to previous studies and it became quite popular. * In 1967, Melvin Novick and Charles Lewis proved that it was equal to reliability if the true scores of the compared tests ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Function (mathematics)
In mathematics, a function from a set (mathematics), set to a set assigns to each element of exactly one element of .; the words ''map'', ''mapping'', ''transformation'', ''correspondence'', and ''operator'' are sometimes used synonymously. The set is called the Domain of a function, domain of the function and the set is called the codomain of the function. Functions were originally the idealization of how a varying quantity depends on another quantity. For example, the position of a planet is a ''function'' of time. History of the function concept, Historically, the concept was elaborated with the infinitesimal calculus at the end of the 17th century, and, until the 19th century, the functions that were considered were differentiable function, differentiable (that is, they had a high degree of regularity). The concept of a function was formalized at the end of the 19th century in terms of set theory, and this greatly increased the possible applications of the concept. A f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Item Response Theory
In psychometrics, item response theory (IRT, also known as latent trait theory, strong true score theory, or modern mental test theory) is a paradigm for the design, analysis, and scoring of Test (student assessment), tests, questionnaires, and similar instruments measurement, measuring abilities, attitudes, or other variables. It is a theory of testing based on the relationship between individuals' performances on a test item and the test takers' levels of performance on an overall measure of the ability that item was designed to measure. Several different statistical models are used to represent both item and test taker characteristics. Unlike simpler alternatives for creating scales and evaluating questionnaire responses, it does not assume that each item is equally difficult. This distinguishes IRT from, for instance, Likert scaling, in which ''"''All items are assumed to be replications of each other or in other words items are considered to be parallel instruments". By contrast ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latent Variable
In statistics, latent variables (from Latin: present participle of ) are variables that can only be inferred indirectly through a mathematical model from other observable variables that can be directly observed or measured. Such '' latent variable models'' are used in many disciplines, including engineering, medicine, ecology, physics, machine learning/artificial intelligence, natural language processing, bioinformatics, chemometrics, demography, economics, management, political science, psychology and the social sciences. Latent variables may correspond to aspects of physical reality. These could in principle be measured, but may not be for practical reasons. Among the earliest expressions of this idea is Francis Bacon's polemic the ''Novum Organum'', itself a challenge to the more traditional logic expressed in Aristotle's Organon: In this situation, the term ''hidden variables'' is commonly used, reflecting the fact that the variables are meaningful, but not observable ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Skewness
In probability theory and statistics, skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable about its mean. The skewness value can be positive, zero, negative, or undefined. For a unimodal distribution (a distribution with a single peak), negative skew commonly indicates that the ''tail'' is on the left side of the distribution, and positive skew indicates that the tail is on the right. In cases where one tail is long but the other tail is fat, skewness does not obey a simple rule. For example, a zero value in skewness means that the tails on both sides of the mean balance out overall; this is the case for a symmetric distribution but can also be true for an asymmetric distribution where one tail is long and thin, and the other is short but fat. Thus, the judgement on the symmetry of a given distribution by using only its skewness is risky; the distribution shape must be taken into account. Introduction Consider the two d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Average
In colloquial, ordinary language, an average is a single number or value that best represents a set of data. The type of average taken as most typically representative of a list of numbers is the arithmetic mean the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list. For example, the mean or average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, and 9 (summing to 25) is 5. Depending on the context, the most representative statistics, statistic to be taken as the average might be another measure of central tendency, such as the mid-range, median, Mode (statistics), mode or geometric mean. For example, the average income, personal income is often given as the median the number below which are 50% of personal incomes and above which are 50% of personal incomes because the mean would be higher by including personal incomes from a few billionaires. General properties If all numbers in a list are the same number, then their average is also equal to this number. This property is shared by each o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mode (statistics)
In statistics, the mode is the value that appears most often in a set of data values. If is a discrete random variable, the mode is the value at which the probability mass function takes its maximum value (i.e., ). In other words, it is the value that is most likely to be sampled. Like the statistical mean and median, the mode is a way of expressing, in a (usually) single number, important information about a random variable or a population (statistics), population. The numerical value of the mode is the same as that of the mean and median in a normal distribution, and it may be very different in highly skewed distributions. The mode is not necessarily unique in a given discrete distribution since the probability mass function may take the same maximum value at several points , , etc. The most extreme case occurs in Uniform distribution (discrete), uniform distributions, where all values occur equally frequently. A mode of a continuous probability distribution is often conside ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
