Analyses of Raters Judgement of Drug Items Communicated by Teenaged Interviewees to Teenaged and Adult Interviewers

Abstract

This paper discusses the analyses of raters judgement of drug items communicated by teenaged interviewees to teenaged and adult interviewers. The subjects were teenagers residing in East, Central and West Harlem, New York. A pool of 298 tapes of interviews was gathered from which sixty tapes were randomly selected using a table of random numbers. Thirty tapes were from the teenaged interviewers and thirty tapes were from the adult interviewers. The types of explanations used by teenagers for drug use or non-use included ten categories established by the investigator. A panel of two raters and the researcher analyzed the tapes. The raters and the researcher's judgement in establishing the reliability of the value of judgement were calculated by the statistical analyses, coefficient of reproducibility and the standard error of difference to determine the extent of agreement or disagreement.