Thin Slice Sampling of Video Footage for Mother/Child Interaction: Application to Single Cases - Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment

Tags

Top Highlights

• The play session was divided into shorter segments (3, 6 and 9 min) and odds ratios of the variable pairs from the shorter segments were compared to the odds ratios from the entire session. Segments of 3 and 6 min did not yield the same pattern of results as the entire session. In single-subject research, evidence of the reliability of the time segment for behavioural coding should be reported in the methods section of original research manuscripts

• The results suggest that coding based on half the entire play session yielded results that were neither discrepant nor widely varying when compared to the findings derived from the entire play session

• If we had used 3 min segments to code data then our conclusions would have differed considerably from the findings based on an entire play session. For example, we would have often concluded that a mother was unlikely to show verbally contingent behaviour on her child’s vocal behaviour where, in fact, this was not the case. Therefore, the experimental hypothesis is supported.

• Clearly, the sample size to be selected is 9 min in duration and the beginning 9 min will be used since this was the only sample that yielded consistently non discrepant results from that of the population

• Video recordings were coded as a continuous variable in INTERACT software (Mangold 2008) to extract the frequency, onset, offset and duration of each mother–child dyads’ gaze and verbal behaviours.