Event Recording

How to Record an Event

While the cumulative recorder was an electromechanical device that automatically recorded animal behavior in the laboratory, the simplest kind of event recording is done by an observer making a tally mark on a piece of paper whenever the behavior of interest occurs. If all that is done is tallying the occurrence of a behavior over some observation period, the dependent measure is simply the frequency or number of behaviors. If the behavior is tallied on a piece of paper that has some indicator of not only the occurrence of the behavior but the time when it was observed, then the experimenter can study the rate of behavior along with its frequency. If other facets of the environment are noted, it may be possible to determine the relationship between the behavior of interest and possible controlling variables in the environment.

There are a number of pragmatic factors that make tallying each and every behavior difficult for an observer. If events occur very rapidly, are hard to discriminate, or do not have a discrete onset and offset, tally marks may produce inaccurate recordings. Often other recording strategies are used. There are times when not just the occurrence of an event is of interest.

Duration recording is when how long an event takes is recorded. If one is trying to establish positive [Page 826]behaviors such as exercise, then start and stop times of each episode of exercise are the parameters of interest. There may be circumstances where monitoring the duration is useful when one wants to decrease total time spent at some nonproductive activity such as total amount of time spent watching television.

Partial duration recording is used when there may not be a clear onset or offset of a behavior. A behavior is counted if it occurred at any time during a specified interval. For example, a teacher might record whether a particular child exhibited cooperative play behavior at any time during 5-minute intervals at recess. This method of event recording is not particularly precise, since the recording procedure doesn't allow one to distinguish between six episodes of cooperative play behavior or one episode that might have occurred during the interval. Since at least one behavior of interest occurred during the specified interval, a tally is recorded.

...