4 Steps of Video Coding¶
Coding behavioral data is a multi-step, iterative process of planning, testing, revising, and refining. You should expect to revise many aspects of your coding plan as the data present you with new information and surprises. Even highly experienced coders should not expect to plan everything ahead of time because new tasks, procedures, populations, and research questions affect participants’ behaviors. Indeed, one of the great joys of coding behavior is that you will always discover new things. Thus, you will likely need to rethink your plan a few times. Fortunately, getting started and making revisions and additions are easy to do in Datavyu.
The overall process involves four steps, which are described in detail below. These four steps will help you to avoid wasting time. We urge you not to collect hours of video before verifying that you can see the behaviors of interest. Do not code hours of data before verifying that your coding scheme is reliable and that you can export the data in a format that works for your statistical and graphical analyses. Otherwise, you may spend valuable time collecting and coding data that you can’t use.
The process begins at Step 1 with a procedure for ensuring that your recordings capture the behaviors of interest; the process ends at Step 4 with an exported file of variables that can be used for statistical and graphical analyses. Each step involves multiple iterations (denoted by the looping arrows). Ideally, earlier steps are completed appropriately before implementing later steps.¶