CEBC Glossary

Reliability

The extent to which the same result will be achieved when repeating the same measure or study again. There are four types of reliability mentioned on this website:

  1. Inter-rater - Persons independently administering the same assessment to the same person should have highly similar results.
  2. Internal - Items on an assessment aimed at measuring the same thing or parts of the same thing (e.g., physical symptoms of anxiety) should be correlated.
  3. Split-half - A method of measuring internal reliability by verifying that half of the items on a scale are correlated with the other half.
  4. Test-retest - A method in which the same measure is administered multiple times and the resulting scores are compared. Assuming no important intervening events, a person's scores on a measure taken multiple times should be correlated.