The Reliability of Generating Data

All data are the result of human actions whether by experimentations, observations, or declarations. As such, the presumption of knowing what data are about is subject to imperfections that can affect the validity of research efforts. With calls for data-based research comes the need to assure the reliability of generated data. The reliability of converting texts into analyzable data has become a burning issue in several areas. However, this issue has been met by only a few limited, and sometimes misleading measures of the extent to which data can be trusted as surrogates of the phenomena of analytical interests. The statistic proposed by the author – "Krippendorff’s Alpha" – is widely used in the social sciences, not only where human judgements are involved but also where measurements are compared.