A Probabilistic Latent Class Model for Assessing Inter-Judge Reliability

Increasingly behavioral researchers are soliciting cognitive responses in addition to standard attitudinal measures when attempting to assess the effects of persuasive communications. The coding of the elicited cognitive responses generally involves some sort of categorization, typically undertaken by independent judges, and the quality of the data is, to a large degree, evaluated in terms of some reliability coefficient which reflects the extent to which the independent judges agreed. The purpose of this paper is to present and illustrate a probabilistic model for assessing inter-judge reliability. The proposed probabilistic model allows one to (a) use formal test statistics to evaluate the extent and character of inter-judge reliability, (b) estimate the assignment error rates and their standard errors, and (c) test for simultaneous agreement for more than two judges. The probabilistic model is operationalized in terms of restricted latent class models.