Human Behavioral Observation Method

Coding Method: Partial Interval Method

Behavior and Definition: The behavior I investigated was studying habits, specifically the efficacy of the study session. To measure how effective the study session was, I defined the behaviors as distracted or not distracted.

The parameters for distractedness include:

Any amount of time on the phone
Participation in a prolonged conversation (I defined a prolonged conversation as one over 15 seconds)

Information on the Subject:

The subject observed for this behavioral method was a University of Scranton student studying alone at a table on first floor Denaples.

Data:

Strengths of this Method: The method I came up with is able to gauge how frequently the subject was distracted along with highlighting periods of consistent work. This method would mostly be useful for overall trends of distractedness

Weaknesses of this Method: This method doesn’t give any information on the duration of the distracted events in many cases the subject would quickly lose focus but then immediately go back to working. With this in mind, the generalizability of this method is limited as it doesn’t fully gauge the efficacy of the study session.