One Scale per Event
In this setup we used only 3 sample codes for the behavioral types, but those codes can be altered and extended to your needs.
Code Definitions
Crucial for this setup:
▪The Observation Codes are stored in one file.
▪Each Code requires an entry in the Prefix column that represents the code itself. This Prefix text will be the expression used in the report to identify the behavior.
▪The rating scale Codes are stored in a second file that is linked to the first.
▪The rating scales are available as descriptive text as well as numbers (this is not a must, you could skip the text and only use the numbers instead)
▪Using the same Key for both the rating text and the corresponding number allows you to log both entries with single click/key.
▪The numerical scales should be assigned to a class called "num", because the special scale based report will base its routine on finding all "_num" entries that where created in combination with the Prefix text.
Data Logging
Coding Mode: Lexical
Coding Method: Event Sampling as well as Time Sampling
Using the Lexical Coding mode as intended during an Event Sampling session, you could log the start time and offset of each event using the SPACEBAR. The moment an event is logged, the video pauses and you have lots of time to enter the correct behavioral code and its rating.
In case you have many partly overlapping behaviors, you can also log the start time and offset of each behavioral code with the code itself, but make sure that you keep track of which event is still open, because an event always needs to be closed with the same key as it was started with!
Further details about this coding mode can be found in the section Lexical Coding Mode.
Because of the Prefix entries in combination with the second level "num" class, will result in data like this:
Statistics
As you can see the different behavioral types per Event are listed in the first column, allowing you to get the frequencies and the duration on each behavior independent from their rating using the basic INTERACT analysis routines.
Because of the Prefix routine, each rating is stored in a separate class column called "xxx_num". This also allows you to get the frequency and duration results on each text based scale per behavior.
For all Class names, ending with "_Num", the special extension routine for a scale specific analysis can be used:
▪Select Plugin - Special Data Analysis > Numerical Scale Statistics from the menu.
This will result in a small results dialog like this:
Copied into Excel, this looks far more readable:
Only columns with numerical content and a name ending with "_Num" are considered!
•All numerical values within a column are counted (text entries are ignored).
•All numerical values are summarized per Class column.
•Based on those results, the average values per behavioral Code is calculated.
•The duration for all Events with a numerical value , is summarized.
•This total duration per Class is divided by the number of numerical values. This way the average duration per behavioral Code and DataSet is provided.