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Paper #07

Tuesday 4th August
16:00-17:30
Session 1 Room 4

This paper reports the results of a study designed to explore the inter-rater reliability of annual report social and environmental disclosures content analysis. Using the sentence-based coding instruments and decision rules adopted in Hackston and Milne (1996), this study reports the co-agreement levels reached by three coders over five rounds of testing 49 annual reports. Included amongst the three coders was a complete novice to both content analysis and social and environmental disclosure research. Krippendorff's (1980) reliability scores for the three coders are reported for many of the typical decisions taken by social and environmental disclosures content analysts. The study also provides a commentary on the implications of formal reliability analysis for past and future social and environmental disclosures content analyses, and exposes the complexities of formal reliability measurement. The overall findings suggest that the coded output from inexperienced coders using the Hackston and Milne approach with little or no prior training can be relied upon for aggregate total disclosures analysis. For more detailed sub-category analysis, however, the findings suggest a period of training for the less experienced codes with at least twenty reports appears necessary before their coded output could be relied upon.

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