Authoritarianism test scores are only moderately stable across eighteen years

Evidence

The intercorrelation of responses to the twenty-eight RWA Scale items averaged .22, yielding an alpha of . on this go around—a little higher than that obtained in 1976. But individual scores proved much less stable, the “‘eighteen-year test-retest reliability” being .59. (The 1986 “twelve-year test-retest reliability” had been .62.) Many people had changed a great deal. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1127

Categorization

• QUESTION: The alpha value appears truncated/omitted in the text (‘yielding an alpha of .’). Worth chasing the original source for the exact reliability.