Making the Subjective Objective? Computer-Assisted Quantification of Qualitative Content Cues to Deception

Research syntheses suggest that verbal content cues are more diagnostic than other cues in discriminating between truth and deception. In many studies on content cues, raters are trained to rate the presence of specific content cues, an inherently subjective process. This necessitates to demonstrate inter-coder reliability first. Depending on the statistical coefficient used, establishing adequate inter-rater reliabilities for these subjective judgments often creates a problem. To address some of these problems, a new method for coding these content cues with a computer program developed for qualitative research, MaxQDA (www.maxqda.de), is proprosed. The application of the program is demonstrated using the Aberdeen Report Judgment Scales (ARJS; Sporer, 2004) with a set of 72 deceptive and true accounts of a driving examination. Data on different types of inter-coder reliabilities are presented and implications for future research with computer-assisted qualitative coding procedures as well as training of coders are outlined.