For the last year I have been developing a package “Lambda4” to improve internal consistency reliability estimation.  In the package’s conception my primary concern centered on H.G. Osburn’s maximized lambda4 estimator.  Despite a very thorough search I could not find a stats package that could utilized Osburn’s method.  I wanted to learn R and so I jumped in and tried to make the function.  The original function has changed dramatically as I learned methods to speed up the code and tweaks to the original method that improved the precision of the estimator.  That function is now called cov.lambda4() and provides a modern perspective on reliability estimation.  The package is slowly developing into a set of function that I have developed as well as a collection of some of the classics and forgotten estimators of internal consistency reliability.  A major update is on the way that will include all 6 of Guttman’s lambdas, and a couple of other relatively unknown estimators.  Follow the blog if you want to hear more about the specific functions in the package.  I will be adding posts for each of them.  If you want to download the package you can use the code in R.

install.packages(“Lambda4”)

for further documentation go here

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Lambda4/index.html

If you have any ideas or comments please post them.