ICR alum and prominent scholar Krippendorff passes away at age 90

Institute of Communications Research alumnus Klaus Krippendorff (PhD '67), one of the most prominent researchers and scholars in the field of communications, passed away in early October at the age of 90. Krippendorff was an emeritus professor of communication who had taught at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication for 55 years. One of his many contributions to the field is the Intercoder Reliability Method that is named after him (Krippendorff’s Alpha Reliability). This method is widely used in the field of communications and social science of quantitative content analysis and allows researchers to verify the accuracy of the reliability between coders. He also developed Krippendorff's Quadrilogy, a software that computes four reliability coefficients from numerous binary coded units of analysis. He was also a past president of the International Communication Association. He authored many books, including The Reliability of Generating Data (2022), Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (2019), On Communicating: Otherness, Meaning, and Information (2009), and more.

View his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer.