Hi!

This might be a very basic question for those of you with more statistical experience than myself and it is not really of technical nature but I hope it is okay that I post it anyway.

I have run a survey with (among others) 3 questions supposed to measure creative self efficacy. The plan was to make a scale of these three items, but when analysing the data the three items get a very low Cronbachs Alpha (0.2396) which signals they should not be combined. But, why is it that we want internal consistency in a scale? After thinking about it I would think that the whole point of asking three different questions and summarising the answer score would be that someone rating high on one item and lower on others would just mean that the score will balance out and overall be more correct. Sort of like triangulation. I understand that if one expects the respondent to score consistent the alpha score is valuable but if you, like this case, attack the problem from three different angles to figure out the more complete picture, does one still seek internal consistency?

In my head this doesn't really make sense, but I'm very new to the game here. Would be very helpful with some help to clarify the issue!


If it is of any interest these are the questions and the alpha table:
  1. I am good at generating new ideas to solve problems (generateIdeas)
  2. I have good imagination (fantasy)
  3. I am more inventive than most of my colleagues (creativeRelative)
Item Obs Sign item-test
correlation		 item-rest
correlation		 average
interitem
covariance		 alpha
generateId~s 161 + 0.5360 0.1202 .0954969 0.1965
creativeR~ve 161 + 0.6931 0.0866 .1085792 0.3086
fantasy 161 + 0.6550 0.1952 .0106755 0.0268
Test scale .0715839 0.2396

(PS: I have also tried to run the omega analysis but it cannot be computed on my data)