An Information-Theoretic Alternative to the Cronbach's Alpha Coefficient of Item Reliability

We propose an information-theoretic alternative to the popular Cronbach alpha coefficient of item reliability. Particularly suitable for contexts in which instruments are scored on a strictly nonnumeric and non ordinal scale, our proposed index is based on functions of the entropy of the empirical distributions defined on the sample space of responses. Our proposed reliability index tracks the Cronbach alpha coefficient uniformly while offering several other advantages discussed in great details in this paper.