Once again, this is something i’ve been asked a fair about recently…’How is Cronbach’s Alpha found using SPSS’
There is a good walk-though on page 196 of Hugh Coolicans book, Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology (5th Ed.). This book explains the use of this reliability test, it’s limitations and offers a guide to interpreting your output.
Here is a screen-by-screen walkthrough of the process:
Choose Analyse
→ Scale
→ Reliability Analysis
Move the variables you’d like to be considered from the left box to the items box on the left. Make sure the model Alpha is selected (it tends to be as default). Select Options and choose what you would like to see in the output. I opted for Scale if item deleted, this is a preference of mine, but not necessarily what you’ll always want. I suggest to look in the Coolican (2009) book for assistance with your choice at this point.
Once you click Continue and then OK, SPSS will produce an output similar to this:
The second table, the Reliability Statistics, gives you the Cronbach’s Alpha value.
Refer to Coolican (2009) or other statistics book (plenty available in the library) for further help on interpreting the results.