Using Multiple Coders for More Than Just Reliability and Validity Checks
Published in: Human Organization, v. 58, no. 3, Fall 1999, p. 313-322
Posted on RAND.org on January 01, 1999
This article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
Social scientists often use agreement among multiple coders to check the reliability and validity of the analytic process. High degrees of interceder agreement indicate that multiple coders are applying the codes in the same manner and are thus acting as reliable measurement instruments. Coders who independently mark the same text for a theme provide evidence that a theme has external validity and is not just a figment of the investigator's imagination. In this article, I extend the use of multiple coders. I use data taken from clinicians' descriptions of personal illness experiences to demonstrate how agreement and disagreement among coders can be used to measure core and peripheral features of abstract constructs and themes. I then show how such measures of multicoder agreement can be used to identify typical or exemplary examples from a corpus of text.
This article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
Our mission to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis is enabled through our core values of quality and objectivity and our unwavering commitment to the highest level of integrity and ethical behavior. To help ensure our research and analysis are rigorous, objective, and nonpartisan, we subject our research publications to a robust and exacting quality-assurance process; avoid both the appearance and reality of financial and other conflicts of interest through staff training, project screening, and a policy of mandatory disclosure; and pursue transparency in our research engagements through our commitment to the open publication of our research findings and recommendations, disclosure of the source of funding of published research, and policies to ensure intellectual independence. For more information, visit www.rand.org/about/research-integrity.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.