2003 Primary Prevention Awareness, Attitude, and Use Survey

Reliability

A good assurance of honest responses from students is making them confident that their responses will remain anonymous. In the PPAAUS administration, students were given the option of not participating; students did not put their names or any identifying marks on their questionnaires; teachers remained at their desks; and surveys were collected by a student, placed into an envelope, and taken to a central collection area. A survey item (#137) asked students if they were made to feel sure that their answers would not be seen by anyone at their school. Eighty-three percent expressed confidence in their anonymity; only 11 percent of the students said no, and seven percent were not sure.

A scale (a group of similar questions) is said to be reliable when the results obtained from it are repeatable and consistent. One of the most commonly used reliability coefficients is Cronbach's Alpha. Alpha is a measure of the internal consistency of a scale and is based on the average correlation of items within the scale. Positive correlations between the items in a scale are expected because they all measure the same construct. Overall, reliability correlations of PPAAUS are very good; results of these analyses can be found in Appendix B.

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