This website is for students following the M.Sc. in Evidence Based Practice at the University of York.
183 students were observed twice by different student observers. These measured height (mm), arm circumference (mm), head circumference, and pulse (beats/min) and recorded sex and eye colour (black, brown, blue, grey, hazel, green, other). They entered these into a computer file. Eye colour and sex were entered as numerical codes.
The following table shows eye colour recorded by the two observers:
Eye colour recorded by first observer | Eye colour recorded by second observer | Total | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
black | brown | blue | grey | hazel | green | other | ||
black | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
brown | 6 | 69 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 80 |
blue | 0 | 0 | 39 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 44 |
grey | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 10 |
hazel | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 4 | 0 | 14 |
green | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 15 | 2 | 20 |
other | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
Total | 12 | 75 | 41 | 6 | 14 | 27 | 8 | 183 |
The Stata output for the kappa statistic for this table is:
. kap eye1 eye2 Expected Agreement Agreement Kappa Std. Err. Z Prob>Z ----------------------------------------------------------------- 79.23% 26.16% 0.7188 0.0385 18.69 0.0000
Question 1:
How would you describe the level of agreement in this table?
Question 2:
The expected agreement is much lower than for sex, where it was 54.52%. Why is this?
How could we improve the kappa statistic?
Question 4:
What pairs of categories might be regarded as minor disagreements?
Question 5:
What might be plausible weights for the pairs of eye colour categories?
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This page maintained by Martin Bland.
Last updated: 21 July, 2008.