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I have a question about reliability/agreement.

100 raters (teachers) evaluated 1 student presentation based on 5 criteria (introduction, eye contact, etc.). Each rater rated each criterion. Each criterion was rated on a 5-point interval scale.

I would now like to calculate the inter-rater reliability for each criterion individually. In other words, to what extent do the teachers agree on the assessment of the criterion of eye contact, for example.

Since I only want to analyze the reliability of 1 item, I believe that many common reliability methods are not applicable (Krippendorf's alpha, ICC).

So my question would be how I could calculate this agreement/reliability? Thank you very much for your help.

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  • $\begingroup$ You say "5-point interval scale"? But did you mean 5-point Likert scale, which would be ordinal? If it is really interval, could you add the details of what this scale is? $\endgroup$
    – jginestet
    Commented Oct 17 at 17:14

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Let's assume you have ordinal data. The problem seems that, with only 1 unit, you can not compute the probability of agreement by chance. There may be a way around this, which has some (non trivial) caveats.
Let's just look at the counts, per scale level, of how many raters agreed on that level. The worse case (for agreement) would be the vetcor $[20,20,20,20,20]$. Overall, the raters disagreed 4000 times. The best case by contrast would $[0,100,0,0,0]$ (or other permutations, where raters all agree on a different level).
So you could replace the "probability of disagreement by chance" by the value 4000 (in your case). Then you can compute e.g. a coefficient (similar to Krippendorff), as $1 - \frac {d_0} {d_c}$, where $d_0$ is the number of observed disagreements, and $d_c$ is 4000. Of course, you could use a similar "worse case" approach with other measures of ordinal interrater agreement.
Caveat; the value (4000) used for $d_c$ is the worse case disagreement. But we know that, in many cases, raters have various biases. E.g. raters could tend to shy away from the extremes (1,5), and instead rate mostly in the "middle" (2,3,4). The value of $d_c$ computed by looking at disagreement accross units takes that into account (i.e. it is not the "worse case", but insted reflects the randomness as observed accross units). So it is not a true Krippendorf alpha (which compares to the natural observed disagreement randomness). But with only 1 unit, we can not observe the natural randomness accross units. So, the next best thing?? So what I am proposing tends to exaggerate agreement. It is up to you to see if that is usable.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you very much for the explanations, which were very helpful. Would it therefore perhaps be wiser if I grouped the 5 criteria together? Category Delivery (= criterion eye contact and gestures) Category Conent (= criterion correctness, introduction etc.) In this way, I would not have the reliability for each criterion, but for individual areas and thus have more meaningful reliability data? $\endgroup$
    – Marc Roux
    Commented Oct 18 at 9:10
  • $\begingroup$ That would not at all solve your main issue which is that you only have 1 "unit" being rated. And in addition, you would now sum ordinal numbers, which is, to say the least, a debatable practice. Note that you could also use Fleiss kappa (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleiss%27_kappa), which can be computed even with only 1 subject (it computes agreement by chance differently). $\endgroup$
    – jginestet
    Commented Oct 18 at 16:22

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