Rochester Interaction Record

The time people spend with each other is often described as social interaction, and understanding human relationships requires understanding social interaction. Social interaction can be studied using various methods, and an important distinction among these methods is the extent to which a method concerns naturally occurring social interaction or social interaction in controlled settings such as the laboratory. Both types of methods have advantages, and in this entry, a popular (almost the standard) method of studying naturally occurring social interaction, the Rochester Interaction Record (RIR), is described.

The RIR was developed by a group of scholars at the University of Rochester (hence the name) in the 1970s. The primary impetus for developing the RIR was a sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the art of studying social interaction. At the time, much of the research on social interaction was laboratory based. Although such studies provided controlled settings in which specific (and often elaborate) hypotheses could be tested, laboratory studies were and remain, by definition, controlled and limited in their focus. For example, in the laboratory, it is not possible to study how socially active people are in their daily lives and how they distribute their interactions (with friends vs. lovers vs. strangers, etc.). Moreover, even when an interpersonal process can be studied in the laboratory (e.g., intimacy), the artificial context of the laboratory may alter the phenomenon being studied. Another popular method, global surveys, also have limitations such as the undue influence of recent events on responses, difficulties in remembering past events, response bias, and so forth.

The RIR was developed to provide scientifically valid and useful descriptions of naturally occurring social interactions. Participants in RIR studies use a standardized form to describe their social interactions each day, and studies usually last for 1 to 3 weeks. A social interaction is usually defined as “any encounter with another person (or people) in which people attend to one another and adjust their behavior in response to one another.” Moreover, because there is broad cross-cultural agreement about what constitutes a social interaction, such a definition has been used successfully worldwide. To avoid overburdening participants by asking them to describe literally every social contact, in most RIR studies, participants are asked to describe interactions that last 10 minutes or longer. The 10-minute limit eliminates few (if any) important interactions. To avoid problems and biases associated with recalling events over long periods of time, participants are required to update their diaries as soon as possible after the interaction. Originally, participants used paper forms, but recent studies have used electronic data collection (e.g., Web-based, Palm pilots). It is important to note that, as revealed by poststudy interviews and questionnaires, participants typically find that maintaining an RIR diary is relatively easy and does not interfere with their daily lives.

Within this framework, the specific data collected about each social interaction can vary and has varied across studies. It is useful to think of these data as describing two broad aspects of interaction: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative aspects include where the interaction occurred, how long it lasted, who was there, what was going on during the interaction, and so forth. Qualitative aspects refer to people's reactions to the interactions: how much they enjoyed the interaction, how intimate they felt the interaction was, the emotions [Page 1387]they experienced during the interaction, and so forth. In this regard, it is important to note that the RIR is more an approach than an etched-in-stone specific method. That is, different researchers may collect different data about social interactions depending on their interests.

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