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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: START YOUR OBSERVATIONS > EVENT SAMPLING - Log Behavioral Events > START Session > Create Events Automatically |
Manually logging Events is the most time-consuming part for any observational study. Cleverly used, INTERACT can help you to minimize this time.
Besides the routine to create empty, interval-based Events for time sampling based observations, and the auto-transcribe command to get a full transcription of your video automatically, INTERACT does offer additional routines to automatically create Events, based on already coded data!
Note: All routines mentioned here, create new Events with new Codes based on your criteria. This means, that after the routine, INTERACT treats those entries as regular Codes and Events, including full statistical values and all.
Co-occurrences
Whenever a required situation can be extracted from a fixed combination of manually coded Events, INTERACT can create new Events for all the situations for you:
With help of the Co-occurrence Filter, new Events are created for all situations where the selected combination of codes is coded simultaneously.
Example: Eye contact is very difficult to code, because it is impossible to look at the eye movements, in two separate faces, accurately at the same time. But if you code the gaze direction of two individuals separately, INTERACT can easily extract all the times where <A> looks at <B> and <B> looks at <A>. A new expression can be defined to label all resulting, automatically created, Events.
Create Pre- and Post-Events
If you are interested in a fixed period before and after specific Events, INTERACT offers a special extension, that is described in Create Pre- and Post Events in the INTERACT Help. It enables you to automatically create Events of a predefined length, right before and after each time your specific key-Event was logged. A demo file is briefly discussed in Examine Demo Files.
Example: You want to analyze the activities of an infant, 30 seconds before and after it imitated the mother. The automatically created Events that cover those periods, simplify analysis a lot.
Contingencies
To search for all occurrences, where a Code A was followed by a Code B within a certain time frame (independent of any Codes in-between), the Contingency Analysis is what you need. In addition to the search, INTERACT can create Events that cover the distance between the two selected Codes.
Response Times
If you have coded two specific codes and are now interested in the timely distance between them, there is no need to log this distance manually. All you need, to create new Events covering the distance between those two Codes, is the Contingency Analysis. Make sure the interval is as long as your session, to catch every possible occasion.
Example: You log a Code whenever a special treat is presented to your subject, and you log the moment your subject is touching this item. With the help of the Contingency analysis, you can create new Events, covering exactly the gap between the two Codes mentioned.
Task duration and other Event chains
If you coded the start and the end of a specific period or behavior with two different Codes, but now need the duration and frequencies on the gaps between those two Codes, the Contingency analysis is all you need, to automatically create the Events that cover those periods. You can create Events within the gaps (Offset A to start time B), from start time A to start time B, from start time A to Offset B or from offset A to Offset B.
The Sequence search module enables you to create new Events for predefined Code sequences.
Fill Gaps
It only takes a single command to make your data exhaustive. Either for one particular Class or for all Classes at once: A single command will add new Events with a Codes of your choice that fill all gaps found.
Merge Successive Events
For those, who have coded the same code successively and now want to join all repetitions within a specific time frame to one Event, INTERACT offers a neat little function as well. For details, read Merge Successive Events in the INTERACT Help.
Example: If you coded every single bark of a dog, but now want to transfer those single codes to longer events called 'Barking' whenever the dog's single barks occurred within 1 second, INTERACT can do just that for you.
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