ABSTRACT
The family of α-measures in the previous chapter merely counted the lengths of intersecting segments, much as the agreement measures for predefined units counted its coincidences and contingencies. They thereby ignored what may well be crucial in the analysis meaningful segments of continua: their contiguities or coherencies.
This chapter rectifies this omission by developing an α-measure that pairs all identified segments and responds to the degree to which they agree on their locations in the continuum, their intersections, and single-valued metric differences assigned to them. This measure does not offer the richness of analytical possibilities of the family of α-measures in Chapter 8 but might be closer to what matters especially to qualitative scholars.
