An Analyst is working on developing an appropriate scale measure of the Loyalty of a company's customers. After some initial work the SPSS Cronbach Alpha output is as follows: Case Processing Summary N % Cases Valid 50 75.8 Excludeda 16 24.2 Total 66 100.0 a. Listwise deletion based on all variables in the procedure. Reliability Statistics Cronbach's Alphaa Cronbach's Alpha Based on Standardized Itemsa N of Items -.060 -.069 4 a. The value is negative due to a negative average covariance among items. This violates reliability model assumptions. You may want to check item codings. Item Statistics Mean Std. Deviation N Loyalty 1 5.40 1.666 50 Loyalty 2 3.84 1.877 50 Loyalty 3 4.64 1.956 50 Loyalty 4 4.66 1.880 50 Inter-Item Correlation Matrix Loyalty 1 Loyalty 2 Loyalty 3 Loyalty 4 Loyalty 1 1.000 .177 .076 -.275 Loyalty 2 .177 1.000 .012 -.299 Loyalty 3 .076 .012 1.000 .210 Loyalty 4 -.275 -.299 .210 1.000 Inter-Item Covariance Matrix Loyalty 1 Loyalty 2 Loyalty 3 Loyalty 4 Loyalty 1 2.776 .555 .249 -.861 Loyalty 2 .555 3.525 .043 -1.056 Loyalty 3 .249 .043 3.827 .773 Loyalty 4 -.861 -1.056 .773 3.535 Item-Total Statistics Scale Mean if Item Deleted Scale Variance if Item Deleted Corrected Item-Total Correlation Squared Multiple Correlation Cronbach's Alpha if Item Deleted Loyalty 1 13.14 10.409 -.011 .102 -.069a Loyalty 2 14.70 10.459 -.075 .103 .046 Loyalty 3 13.90 7.112 .204 .068 -.574a Loyalty 4 13.88 11.822 -.177 .194 .215 a. The value is negative due to a negative average covariance among items. This violates reliability model assumptions. You may want to check item codings. Scale Statistics Mean Variance Std. Deviation N of Items 18.54 13.070 3.615 4 Comment on the analyst's efforts and advise what changes you would make to improve the scale if necessary