An alternative way of thinking about internal consistency is that it is the extent to which all of the items of a test measure the same latent variable. The advantage of this perspective over the notion of a high average correlation among the items of a test – the perspective underlying Cronbach's alpha – is that the average item correlation is affected by skewness (in the distribution of item correlations) just as any other average is. Thus, whereas the modal item correlation is zero when the items of a test measure several unrelated latent variables, the average item correlation in such cases will be greater than zero.