Internal consistency refers to what aspect of a questionnaire?

Internal consistency refers to what aspect of a questionnaire?

• A. The relationship between items and the concept they are intended to represent
• B. The reproducibility of a score over time
• C. Inter-rater reliability
• D. Content validity

Answer: (A)

Internal consistency assesses whether the items in a questionnaire all tap the same underlying construct. It looks at how responses to different items relate to one another; when items are measuring the same concept, their answers tend to correlate and the overall scale yields a coherent score. This is typically evaluated with statistics like Cronbach's alpha. It’s different from test-retest reliability, which checks whether a score stays the same over time, from inter-rater reliability, which looks at agreement between different scorers, and from content validity, which asks whether the items cover the full domain of the construct. So, the aspect internal consistency measures is the relationship between items and the concept they are intended to represent.

Internal consistency assesses whether the items in a questionnaire all tap the same underlying construct. It looks at how responses to different items relate to one another; when items are measuring the same concept, their answers tend to correlate and the overall scale yields a coherent score. This is typically evaluated with statistics like Cronbach's alpha. It’s different from test-retest reliability, which checks whether a score stays the same over time, from inter-rater reliability, which looks at agreement between different scorers, and from content validity, which asks whether the items cover the full domain of the construct. So, the aspect internal consistency measures is the relationship between items and the concept they are intended to represent.