Coding Data

Sometimes, instead of running live participants in the lab, you will be tasked with creating data via your observations of certain events. For example, you might watch hours of videos of beluga whales to count the number of times certain behaviors (e.g., contact, vocalizations, interactions with objects) occur, or you might watch videos of child-parent interactions to take notes of certain behaviors like how close the child and parent sit next to each other. This type of research activity is knowing as “coding” or “scoring.” Depending on the research lab, some RAs may be asked to code hours of video or audio recordings. The task may seem tedious, but it is critical because it creates data about the video in a way that helps your research team answer questions.