Measuring the Reliability of Qualitative Text Analysis Data

This paper reports a new tool for assessing the reliability of text interpretations heretofore unavailable to qualitative research. It responds to a combination of two challenges, the problem of assessing the reliability of multiple interpretations -- a solution to this problem was anticipated earlier (Krippendorff, 1992) but not fully developed -- and the problem of identifying units of analysis within a continuum of text and similar representations (Krippendorff, 1995). The paper sketches the family of α-coefficients, which this paper extends, and then describes its new arrival. A computational example is included in the Appendix.