Question

How do I demostrate internal consistency of the instruments I used for my report?

- Diener, Emmons, Larsen and Griffin’s (1985) Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS)

- Schwarzer and Jerusalem’s (1995) Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE)

Answer 1

Internal consistency is usually measured with Cronbach's alpha, a statistic calculated from the pairwise correlations between items. You can obtain this value from the manual of the aforementioned instruments that you used for the report. A value of 0.8 and above is considered to indicate a high degree of internal consistency. If you want to calculate the internal consistency of these scales on your sample, you would need to calculate Cronbach’s alpha for these scales yourself.