Premium
A Study of Coder Variability
Author(s) -
Kalton Graham,
Stowel Richard
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series c (applied statistics)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.205
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9876
pISSN - 0035-9254
DOI - 10.2307/2347199
Subject(s) - statistics , mathematics , econometrics
S ummary Survey questionnaires often contain open‐ended questions, for which interviewers are required to record respondents' replies verbatim. Errors can arise in coding these replies in preparation for statistical analysis. The paper reports the results of an experiment examining the levels of reliability attained by six professional coders in making judgemental codings of a sample of responses to six survey questions. A sizeable degree of unreliability was found, especially with the use of general and “catch‐all” codes. Intra‐coder correlation coefficients, measuring the correlated component of coder variance, were generally small; it is noted, however, that even small values of these coefficients can lead to a substantial loss in precision for survey results.