Behavioral Observations

In my behavior study, I chose to observe how many times my subject drank water from her giant Stanley mug. I used a partial interval method to collect my data, if the subject drank water at all during an interval, this was counted for the entire interval. For an hour of observation, I chose five-minute intervals for the frequency of data collection. During this time, the subject drank water from her Stanley during seven of the twelve intervals. For this method, I believe that its strength is the simplicity. It makes collecting data much easier because you do not need to watch them quite as closely as frequency coding. Unfortunately, this does not measure the frequency of the drinking, so if a subject drinks water 10 times during an interval, this still only counts as one count in the interval.