Departmental Papers (ASC)
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
December 2004
Abstract
This paper reports a new tool for assessing the reliability of text interpretations heretofore unavailable to qualitative research. It responds to a combination of two challenges, the problem of assessing the reliability of multiple interpretations -- a solution to this problem was anticipated earlier (Krippendorff, 1992) but not fully developed -- and the problem of identifying units of analysis within a continuum of text and similar representations (Krippendorff, 1995). The paper sketches the family of α-coefficients, which this paper extends, and then describes its new arrival. A computational example is included in the Appendix.
Keywords
reliability, qualitative, text analysis, unitizing, multiple interpretations, krippendorff’s alpha
Date Posted: 22 January 2008
This document has been peer reviewed.

Comments
Postprint version. Published in Quality and Quantity, Volume 38, Issue 6, December 2004, pages 787-800.
Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11135-004-8107-7