A BRIEF REPORT ON A COMPARISON OF TIME‐SAMPLING PROCEDURES1

Abstract

Much behavioral research has been based on an observation method in which an observer continuously time-sampled the occurrence of certain responses, typ- ically making a notation of occurrence or nonoccur- rence every 10 sec.Research and training settings often had the resources to allow such recording for every subject under study.Applied settings, by con- trast, often could not afford an observer for every subject under study, and at present, even research and training settings find their funding inadequate for continuous time-sampling.Thus, intermittent timesampling becomes necessary, and the question arises: how accurate is recording in each of the various possi- ble patterns of intermittency?This brief report uses the teacher-training model to examine some quantita- tive comparisons.In teacher training, especially in preschool settings, a number of subjects will probably be in each training analysis.Some subjects may be teachers being taught behavior-management skills; other subjects may be child-students in their classes, whose behavior is pre- sumably changing as a function of the teachers' application of those behavior-management techniques.In the ideal case, one observer would continuously re- cord each subject's rates of the management skills or other relevant behaviors.For the comparison to fol- low, it was assumed that such a sharply curtailed observer budget was in force that only one observer would be available to observe four subjects.Obvi- ously, a quarter of the observer's total time could be assigned to each subject.The observer might be as- signed to four teachers, or four children, or two teach- ers and two children-in other words, any four sub- jects (or any four behavior codes).Three possible patterns of such assignments are described; for convenience, these are based on a 64-min session potentially divisible into sixteen 4-min segments of observation.One simple and straightforward method, labelled Contiguous, would assign the first quarter of the pe- riod (16 min) to observation of Subject 1, the next 'This project

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 62 citations exist upstream.