Assessing inter-rater reliability in scoring the Attachment Story Completion Task with kindergarten childre

The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of inter-rater reliability that could be established using the Attachment Story completion Task. Nine female and six male children, averaging 67 months in age, were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Four raters individually scored the children. A Kappa of.7 was established as the standard for this study as an acceptable level of agreement among the raters. The raters scored the three groups of children one at a time, with discussions of scoring procedures in between the groups if Kappa was below.7. The Kappa scores of all three groups were below.7 indicating that inter-rater was difficult to establish in this study. The results suggest that the Attachment Story Completion Task may need adaptation if it is used with children over the age of three for whom it was developed.