A nonparametric measure of intraclass correlation

A nonparametric measure of intraclass correlation based on the probability of certain types of concordances among the observations and which can be estimated from ranked data is proposed. One estimator whose variance can be estimated in an unbiased way is shown to be asymptotically normally distributed. Properties of the measure and its estimator are studied for a normal model; in particular the method is shown to provide a relatively powerful test of the null hypothesis of zero intraclass correlation in a normal population.