ABSTRACT
This chapter builds explicitly on the theoretical analysis of consensus provided by Donald W. Fiske. It diverges somewhat from Fiske's analysis, however, in the relative emphasis on agreement, rather than disagreement, among raters making global personality judgments. Consensus is usually interpreted to mean agreement between raters, but it is sometimes used synonymously with words such as congruence, concordance, consistency, correlation, and/or reliability. Everyday definitions support the use of these terms as synonyms, but psychometricians tend to reserve the terms agreement and congruence to mean absolute interchangeability. The nature of the description of interrater consensus often varies according to the research perspective. In formal methodologic terms, the different perspectives may vary in terms of whether targets and/or judges are considered to be fixed or random. For example, one industrial psychologist may be interested in perceptions of a fixed corporate chief executive officer (CEO) by a random sample of employees.
