Human Observation

For my observation, I observed how focused my roommate was while doing her school work. I defined being focused paying attention as paying attention to one thing without getting distracted by other things around you. In this case, my roommate would be considered focused if she was only paying attention to her schoolwork without being distracted by her phone, quad-mates, or anything else that was around her. To measure how focused she was, I used the partial interval method. I split one hour into 12 five minute intervals. Every time my roommate got distracted during that five minute interval, I recorded a tick mark. A distraction was considered as my roommate briefly stopping her schoolwork to pay attention to something else, such as her phone.  The observation started at 4:12PM and ended at 5:12PM. 

4:12-4:17: 1 tick mark                                   4:42-4:47: 0 tick marks

4:17-4:22: 2 tick marks                                4:47-4:52: 0 tick marks

4:22-4:27: 8 tick marks                               4:52-4:57: 1 tick mark

4:27-4:32: 8 tick marks                               4:57-5:02: 1 tick mark

4:32-4:37: 1 tick mark                                 5:02-5:07: 1 tick mark

4:37-4:42: 1 tick mark                                 5:07-5:12: 1 tick mark

My roommate got distracted a total of 25 times in an hour.  However, she was mostly distracted for two five minutes intervals. In total she was mostly distracted for ten minutes within the hour I was observing her in. This shows that she was moderately focused on her school work. One strength of this method is that it shows an estimate of the duration of the behavior. For example, my roommate got distracted a total of 25 times during the observation but that only lasted for ten minutes during the hour observation. One disadvantage of this method is that it does not consider the rate of the behavior that occurred.  For example, if a behavior occurred multiple times in one interval, it only be recorded as occuring once.