First letter of the Greek alphabet. OK, OK, I know you knew that! It can come up with all sorts of meanings in equations but (a) I doubt if that’ll hit you and (b) if it does, the text around the equation should explain the meaning. That leaves us two main ways it crops up in our fields. The first is a bit estoric and the second, Cronbach’s alpha, or Cronbach’s coefficient alpha, is a bit complex but important so it will get an entry all of its own.
Details #
OK, so the way you may see “alpha” all on its own, not in an equation and not explained will be in a fairly statistical paper where the authors are doing that irritating thing of assuming that everyone knows this. It’s the criterion for statistical significance so almost always it will be .05, or 1/20. It’s the false positive rate for the null hypothesis statistical testing paradigm. See below.
Try also #
Inferential testing, “tests”, statistical tests
“NS”, “p > .05”, “non-significant”
False positive rate/risk
Cronbach coefficient alpha
Chapters #
Chapter 5
Online resources #
None currently
Dates #
First created 3.xii.23.
