Affiliation:
1. Department of Educational Psychology University of Connecticut
2. Rockville General Hospital Rockville, Connecticut
Abstract
An issue for researchers studying special or selected populations is how to obtain reliability estimates on instruments. In our 1993 study assessing the attitudes of intubated patients using a social cognition technique, the internal reliability estimate was 0.83. This study replicated and extended this finding and included items requesting subjects to estimate their ability to imagine the simulated intubation process. For 130 undergraduates alpha was 0.83. Most subjects reported they were able to imagine the situation and respond to the items accordingly. These results confirm the reliability and may have implications for estimating reliability of other scales which cannot be easily tested on large samples. While present estimates cannot be generalized, the procedure may provide useful feedback to researchers.