[Air-L] SPSS tool for calculating Krippendorff's Alpha; another book on content analysis

[Bill Herman]

Thanks all for the input on content analysis. I also find Krippendorff's 
book and ideas quite helpful.

Most thankfully, Andrew Hayes at Ohio State has created a handy SPSS 
macro for calculating Krippendorff's Alpha, complete with a 
bootstrapping algorithm for estimating the confidence intervals. See:

http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/ahayes/SPSS%20programs/kalpha.htm

If you have SPSS, my understanding is that this is the only 
Krippendorff's Alpha solution you'll need. Be warned, though: run it 
once without the bootstrapping calculation just to get the calculation 
first, because WHOAH does it take a lot of processing power. Basically, 
if you're doing the full 10,000 bootstrap, run it right before a trip to 
the coffee shop, and even then, it may still be running when you come 
back. (You can still email or whatever while it runs in the background.)

On a somewhat less intimidating note, I don't think anybody's mentioned 
the book ANALYZING MEDIA MESSAGES, by Riffe, Lacy, and Fico, which is 
pretty accessible and still a good on-ramp toward more advanced work. I 
like KK's book better; if you want to understand the theory behind 
calculating reliability estimates, for instance, there's no comparison. 
Pick Krippendorff. Yet I'd be much more comfortable assigning the Riffe 
book for an undergrad methods course, for instance.

Cheers,

Bill

Bill D. Herman
Ph.D. Candidate
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania
bherman at asc.upenn.edu