Reliability in Content Analysis. 论文

详细信息

发表期刊/会议

Human Communication Research

发表日期

2004-07-01

发表年份

2004

摘要

In a recent article in this journal, Lombard, Snyder-Duch, and Bracken (2002) surveyed 200 content analyses for their reporting of reliability tests, compared the virtues and drawbacks of five popular reliability measures, and proposed guidelines and standards for their use. Their discussion revealed that numerous misconceptions circulate in the content analysis literature regarding how these measures behave and can aid or deceive content analysts in their effort to ensure the reliability of their data. This article proposes three conditions for statistical measures to serve as indices of the reliability of data and examines the mathematical structure and the behavior of the five coefficients discussed by the authors, as well as two others. It compares common beliefs about these coefficients with what they actually do and concludes with alternative recommendations for testing reliability in content analysis and similar data-making efforts.