4. I like to repair engines and machinery.

We can see right away that item four looks odd and does not seem to measure Attitudes Toward Iguanas. But let’s see what happens in the reliability analysis.

Assume we get four people—Mary, Ted, Alice, and Bill—to give their responses to these four items on a fivepoint scale on which 1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neutral/Undecided, 4 = Agree, and 5 = Strongly Agree.

Here are their answers in a table form.

Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4 Mary 1 2 1 3 Ted 5 4 5 3 Alice 3 3 2 5 Bill 2 1 3 4 It appears that Mary, who is majoring in accounting, does not like iguanas because she strongly disagreed with items 1 and 3, whereas Ted, who is a zoology major, strongly agreed with items 1 and 3.

Here is how we perform a reliability analysis using SPSS (Windows Versions 11 and above):