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The agreement chart
Journal article

The agreement chart

Abstract

BackgroundWhen assessing the concordance between two methods of measurement of ordinal categorical data, summary measures such as Cohen’s (1960) kappa or Bangdiwala’s (1985) B-statistic are used. However, a picture conveys more information than a single summary measure.MethodsWe describe how to construct and interpret Bangdiwala’s (1985) agreement chart and illustrate its use in visually assessing concordance in several example clinical applications.ResultsThe agreement charts provide a visual impression that no summary statistic can convey, and summary statistics reduce the information to a single characteristic of the data. However, the visual impression is personal and subjective, and not usually reproducible from one reader to another.ConclusionsThe agreement chart should be used to complement the summary kappa or B-statistics, not to replace them. The graphs can be very helpful to researchers as an early step to understand relationships in their data when assessing concordance.

Authors

Bangdiwala SI; Shankar V

Journal

BMC Medical Research Methodology, Vol. 13, No. 1,

Publisher

Springer Nature

Publication Date

July 29, 2013

DOI

10.1186/1471-2288-13-97

ISSN

1471-2288

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