Early History of the Kappa Statistic

Author(s): Nigel C. Smeeton

Source: Biometrics, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Sep., 1985), p. 795
Published by: International Biometric Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2531300
Accessed: 21-04-2019 11:33 UTC

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 CORRESPONDENCE

Early History of the Kappa Statistic

From: Nigel C. Smeeton

General Practice Research Unit
Institute of Psychiatry
DeCrespigny Park
Denmark Hill
London SE5 8AF, England

To the Editor of Biometrics:

The recent article by O'Connell and Dobson (Biometrics 40, 973-983, December 1984), in common
with most work on the subject of observer agreement, traces the history of the kappa statistic back to
Cohen (1960). Readers may be interested to know that Francis Galton (1892) developed a measure
("centisimal scale") equivalent to the conditional kappa statistic described by Light (1971) in order
to assess whether corresponding fingertips on left and right hands had the same patterns more
frequently than could be expected on the basis of chance alone. Interestingly, Galton noted his
uncertainty about this measure and in fact he later discarded it.

REFERENCES

Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological
Measurement 20, 37-46.
Galton, F. (1892). Finger Prints. London: Macmillan.
Light, R. J. (1971). Measures of response agreement for qualitative data: Some generalizations and
alternatives. Psychological Bulletin 76, 365-377.

795

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