Post date: Nov 18, 2014 3:55:15 PM

QIPSR Workshop

Friday, November 21^st, 2014

1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in the Marksbury Building Auditorium (just north of Rose and Euclid)

Michael Toland, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Kentucky, College of Education

Dominique Zephyr, Statistics Department & Applied Statistics Laboratory, University of Kentucky,

Social scientists frequently create scales to summarize important characteristics of concepts and variables that may have many different aspects. When one uses factor analysis to find important factors that can be brought into a scale, these factor loadings can be quite helpful in creating scales and Cronbach’s alpha has been used for many years to estimate scale reliability. However, criticisms of alpha have increased in recent years to the point that many statisticians indicate that one should not use Cronbach’s alpha except in the most limited of circumstances where it is actually a lower bound rather than a best estimate. This seminar-workshop will guide us through the use and calculation of Omega and some other measures, and point in the direction of Item Response Theory, and Rasch Measurement Techniques, which will be more advanced topics that will be taken up in Future QIPSR Seminars. Part of the difficulty of these measures is that they are not automatically produced by standard statistical packages. This seminar will not only discuss the theory of the measures, but also demonstrate how they are calculated. If you have ever constructed a scale, you need to learn the techniques that will be discussed in this seminar. If you are interested in attending, please registerat https://qipsr.as.uky.edu/alpha-omega-and-beyond. Also, you are welcome to download Mplus demo beforehand if they want to follow along in Mplus, but this is not required. They can download the demo version from

http://www.statmodel.com/demo.shtml

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