Reliability Analysis

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Reliability Analysis

Jims More
I am doing reliability analysis for the 20 items (4-point scale).  The outputs showed warning which read:

    "The determinant of the covariance matrix is zero or approximately zero. Statistics based on its inverse matrix cannot be computed and they are displayed as system missing values."

What is the layman meaning of the warning?

On the other hand, the "squared multiple correlation" column is empty for all items.  What does it mean?

Thanks you.
Jims




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Re: Reliability Analysis

Art Kendall
It means that one (or more) item(s) is (are) correlated close to 1.00 with one or a set of other items. I.e., the squared multiple correlation cannot be computed. Some items are "perfectly" predicted from each other.

Do you have a sufficiently large number of cases after listwise deletion?  Are any pairwise correlations close to 1.00?
Are you sure no item is included twice in the set of variables for the scale? Are any corrected item-total correlations very high?
Are there items that make a trivial difference between the overall alpha and the alpha if item deleted?


Art Kendall
Social Research Consultants


Jims More wrote:
I am doing reliability analysis for the 20 items (4-point scale).  The outputs showed warning which read:

    "The determinant of the covariance matrix is zero or approximately zero. Statistics based on its inverse matrix cannot be computed and they are displayed as system missing values."

What is the layman meaning of the warning?

On the other hand, the "squared multiple correlation" column is empty for all items.  What does it mean?

Thanks you.
Jims




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Art Kendall
Social Research Consultants