Dr. Neuendorf has served as a consultant to the programmers, but neither Dr. Neuendorf nor Cleveland State University claim any degree of ownership in the program. We are grateful to Skymeg Software management for their generosity in sharing the "alpha" version of the software with academic content analysis researchers. Never before has there been a software available that shortcuts the onerous process of calculating intercoder reliability coefficients for (a) multiple coders, across (b) multiple variables.

PRAM is a Windows-based application for the PC.  A trial version of the program can now be downloaded from the following website:

http://www.geocities.com/skymegsoftware/pram.html

PRAM requires an input data file that is formatted for Excel (with an .xls extension). The SPSS program for PC has the capability of saving data files as .xls. The file must be structured in the following way: (1) The first column must contain the coder IDs in numeric form, (2) the second column must contain the unit (case) IDs in numeric form, and (3) all other columns may contain numerically coded variables, with variable names on the header line. All reliability cases may be included in a single file--the main feature of the program is its ability to organize data lines by coder IDs and unit IDs, and to calculate reliability coefficients for all pairs of coders, as well as for all coders taken together.

The program provides the following reliability statistics (see Chapter 7 for explanations and formulas):

For coder pairs:

Assumed level of measurement:

Percent agreement

In a Windows environment, the PRAM user may select the following for each analysis conducted:

• The ID numbers of the coders to be included
• The variable names of the measures to be assessed
• The statistic to be calculated

The output of PRAM is displayed on-screen, and is saveable to disk or drive as a ??? file. If a "coder pair" coefficient is selected, the output presents (1) the selected reliability coefficient for each and every variable specified for each pair of coders separately, and (2) the average of the selected reliability coefficient across all pairs of coders. If a "multiple coders" coefficient is selected, the output presents the overall statistic for each and every variable specified.

In conducting analyses for all coder pairs separately, the program provides a diagnostic tool for identifying coders whose performance may be sub-standard. The program also accommodates instances in which not all coders analyze exactly all the same units. For each coder pair, PRAM matches all common units by unit IDs, and calculates the coder pair reliability coefficients on the basis of that common set.