Scott's Pi
Scott's pi is a chance-corrected coefficient of intercoder agreement for two coders working on a nominal scale, introduced by William Scott in 1955 specifically for content analysis. It improves on raw percent agreement by subtracting the agreement two coders would reach by chance, where chance is estimated from a single pooled distribution of categories shared by both coders rather than from each coder's separate marginals.
Read the full method
Sign in with a free account to read this section.
Method map
The neighbourhood of related methods — select a node to explore.
Sources
- Scott, W. A. (1955). Reliability of content analysis: The case of nominal scale coding. Public Opinion Quarterly, 19(3), 321–325. DOI: 10.1086/266577 ↗
- Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20(1), 37–46. DOI: 10.1177/001316446002000104 ↗
- Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780761915454
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Scott's Pi Intercoder Reliability Coefficient. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/communication/scott-pi-reliability
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Holsti's MethodCommunication↔ compare
- Intercoder ReliabilityCommunication↔ compare
- Krippendorff's AlphaCommunication↔ compare
- Manifest Content AnalysisCommunication↔ compare