An ordinal measure of interrater absolute agreement

Abstract: A measure of interrater absolute agreement for ordinal scales is proposed capitalizing on the dispersion index for ordinal variables proposed by Giuseppe Leti. The procedure allows to avoid the problem of restriction of variance that sometimes affect traditional measures of interrater agreement in different fields of application. An unbiased estimator of the proposed measure is introduced and its sampling properties are investigated. In order to construct confidence intervals for interrater absolute agreement both asymptotic results and bootstrapping methods are used and their performance is evaluated. Simulated data are employed to demonstrate the accuracy and practical utility of the new procedure for assessing agreement. Finally, an application to a real case is provided.