Intercoder Reliability Techniques: Krippendorff’s Alpha

Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient is a statistical measure of the agreement among multiple replications of data-making processes. It emerged in the 1970s in content analyses projects whereby textual or visual units of analysis were categorized or valued by trained coders following written instructions. It has since been used in counseling and survey research where experts code open-ended interviews into analyzable terms, in medical laboratories where alternative methods of testing need to be compared, and in computational linguistics where the reliability of identifying syntactical or semantic parts of corpora is an issue.

Krippendorff’s alpha generalizes several known agreement statistics. It is applicable to any number of observers, coders, or judges, not just two; accepts any number of categories or values; can handle binary, nominal, ...

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