I have mentioned Cees van der Eijk’s measure of agreement before, and Leik’s measure of ordinal consensus. Unsurprisingly, others have come across this issue, discontent with the widespread use of standard deviations (inappropriate as this can be). Tastle & Wierman (2007) take a quite different approach, taking the Shannon entropy as the starting point. I have added this to my R package agrmt on R-Forge, and will push it through to CRAN once the documentation is up to scratch. It’s interesting how many different approaches are developed to address the same problem; clearly the different solutions have not spread wide enough to prevent doubling the effort.
Tastle, W., and M. Wierman. 2007. Consensus and dissention: A measure of ordinal dispersion. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 45 (3): 531-545.
Didier Ruedin 