Kappa parameters

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Kappa parameters

The moment you confirmed the dialog that appeared after selecting the command Analysis - Reliability - Kappa Btn_KappaCalc, the Kappa calculation parameters dialog appears:

Kappa_parameter

You can run the routine with the default settings to start with, but you probably need to adjust these parameters have to your needs. These settings can influence the resulting Kappa values tremendously!

Note: There are no general 'best' setting, because they depend on the type of Codes, length of your Events, required accuracy etc. Adjusting the parameters to fit you data best does not turn bad-data into good-data, but with the right settings you are able to get the best Kappa result value possible.

To help you understand the meaning of those settings, read the topic called Kappa Pair Finding Routine.

Criteria for Matches

This setting is the foundation for finding matching pairs:

oOverlap in percentage - For all Codes with duration, you can adjust the first slider to determine the amount of overlapping you need. If your Codes are all rather short, you need to reduce the overlap factor to get usable results.

oTolerance time window - For very short Events, your Codes might not overlap at all. The time value field, allows you to define the interval within which the matching Code need to be coded, in order to be counted as a match.
It is again important to take your type of data into account. If many things happen in a very short time, you should reduce this value in order not to deform your results.

During the routine, INTERACT first tries to build pair-connections based on the first ‘overlapping’ parameter and create connections between all matching pairs found.

If no more pair-connections can be build, based on the overlapping percentage setting, the second tolerance setting is applied and all remaining Codes are checked accordingly, to try and build pair-connections.

A more detailed description can be found in the topic Kappa Pair Finding Routine.

Criteria for Mismatches

Basically the same routine is available for labeling mismatches. After all matching connections are created based on the overlapping percentage and tolerance window for the matches, the same is done for the remaining Events based on the criteria for mismatches.

Start out with about the same percentage and tolerance values as specified for the criteria for matches.

If the result table shows a log of 'no pairs', you can reduce the percentage of overlap and increase the tolerance window do create additional connections

The mismatch-connections will be displayed in red in the Kappa Graph. Codes with no counterpart at all, appear in the "No pairs" column/line and are displayed in blue in the Kappa Graph.

Comparison Method

You can now choose across what documents can be calculated:

oCompare document 1 with document 2 - Classic way of calculating Kappa

oCompare document 1 with all others - Automatically compares the file selected as Document A in the Kappa Graph with each of the currently open documents. All codes and pairs found are accumulated in the results table and used to calculate Kappa.

oCross-compare all documents - If there is no 'leading' document, you can make INTERACT compare all documents with one another.

Start the Pair-Finding routine

Confirm your setting with OK to start the Pair-finding routine.

When finished, the first thing you see is a visualization of all pairs found: The Kappa-Graph

Read the topic Kappa-Graph for further details.