1985/03/01 by Domenic V. Cicchetti, Donald Shoinralter, Peter Tyrer +1 · 291 citations
Decision Sciences · Mathematics · Medicine · Psychology · #A priori and a posteriori #Econometrics #Hemodynamic Monitoring and Therapy #Inter-rater reliability #Mathematics #Meta-analysis and systematic reviews #Metric (unit) #Monte Carlo method #Operations management #Ordinal Scale #Psychology #Rating scale #Reliability (semiconductor) #Reliability and Agreement in Measurement #Scale (ratio) #Statistics
paper · open access · doi:10.1177/014662168500900103
published in Applied Psychological Measurement 9(1), 31-36 (SAGE Publishing)
crossref issued 1985/03/01 · crossref published 1985/03/01 · crossref published-online 1985/03/01 · crossref published-print 1985/03/01 · openalex publication_date 1985/03/01 · crossref created 2007/03/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2026/04/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02 · crossref indexed 2026/08/01
A computer simulation study was designed to in vestigate the extent to which the interrater reliability of a clinical scale is affected by the number of cate gories or scale points (2, 3, 4, ... ,100). Results in dicate that reliability increases steadily up to 7 scale points, beyond which no substantial increases occur, even when the number of scale poirits is increased to as many as 100. These findings hold under the follow ing conditions: (1) The research investigator has insuf ficient a priori knowledge to use as a reliable guide line for deciding on an appropriate number of scale points to employ, and (2) the dichotomous and ordinal categories being considered all have an underlying metric or continuous scale format.