Observational desgin

Question 1

What are behavioural categories?

Answer 1

target behaviour is systematically divided up into operationalised and specific categories

Question 2

What must the categories be?

Answer 2

• objective
• mutually exclusive
• covers all possible behaviours within the target behaviour

Question 3

What is time sampling?

Answer 3

recording behavioural categories within a specific time frame

Question 4

Strength of time sampling?

Answer 4

More flexibility to be able to record unexpected types of behaviour

Question 5

Limits of time sampling?

Answer 5

Can miss behaviour outside the recording periods

Question 6

What is event sampling?

Answer 6

Counting all the number of times a behavioural category occurs during a given time period

Question 7

Strength of event sampling?

Answer 7

• behaviours can be tallied if that behaviour has been included in the list

Question 8

Limits of event sampling?

Answer 8

May miss relevant behaviour that isn’t on the list of behavioural categories

Question 9

What is inter-observer reliability?

Answer 9

Refers to the extent at which their is consistency between two or more observers recordings
If there is over 80% or 0.8 then they have high inter-observer reliability

Question 10

How does inter-observer reliability work?

Answer 10

1) agree and use the same checklist of operationalised categories
2) Observations is conducted separately by each observer
3) Compare the two independent data sets and test for correlation (spearman’s rho)