The rating reliability calculator

BACKGROUND: Rating scales form an important means of gathering evaluation data. Since important decisions are often based on these evaluations, determining the reliability of rating data can be critical. Most commonly used methods of estimating reliability require a complete set of ratings i.e. every subject being rated must be rated by each judge. Over fifty years ago Ebel described an algorithm for estimating the reliability of ratings based on incomplete data. While his article has been widely cited over the years, software based on the algorithm is not readily available. This paper describes an easy-to-use Web-based utility for estimating the reliability of ratings based on incomplete data using Ebel's algorithm. METHODS: The program is available public use on our server and the source code is freely available under GNU General Public License. The utility is written in PHP, a common open source imbedded scripting language. The rating data can be entered in a convenient format on the user's personal computer that the program will upload to the server for calculating the reliability and other statistics describing the ratings. RESULTS: When the program is run it displays the reliability, number of subject rated, harmonic mean number of judges rating each subject, the mean and standard deviation of the averaged ratings per subject. The program also displays the mean, standard deviation and number of ratings for each subject rated. Additionally the program will estimate the reliability of an average of a number of ratings for each subject via the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula. CONCLUSION: This simple web-based program provides a convenient means of estimating the reliability of rating data without the need to conduct special studies in order to provide complete rating data. I would welcome other researchers revising and enhancing the program.