PsychologyAugust 15, 2026

kappa

KAP-uh

Definition

A statistical measure used to assess the level of agreement between two raters or measurements, accounting for the possibility that the agreement occurred by chance.

Etymology

The word is the name of the tenth letter of the Greek alphabet, which was adopted into English and later used in statistics to denote this specific measure of agreement.

In the news

The article uses kappa to show the poor level of agreement between retrospective adult memories and contemporaneous childhood records, explaining that a low score indicates the two measures often do not match.

Across 16 studies and 25,471 people, what adults remembered about their childhood agreed poorly with what had been recorded at the time, and the two versions predicted different adult outcomes, which is a problem for every article about how you were rais

Read the full article ↗

ScienceBlog.com

Related words

Learn words like this every day

Meet new words every morning.

Newspoken pulls carefully chosen words from the day’s news — with clear definitions, context, and light review that makes them stick. Get it on your phone.