A BRIEF REPORT ON A COMPARISON OF TIME‐SAMPLING PROCEDURES1

Abstract

Much behavioral research has been based on an observation method in which an observer continuously time-sampled the occurrence of certain responses, typ- ically making a notation of occurrence or nonoccur- rence every 10 sec.Research and training settings often had the resources to allow such recording for every subject under study.Applied settings, by con- trast, often could not afford an observer for every subject under study, and at present, even research and training settings find their funding inadequate for continuous time-sampling.Thus, intermittent timesampling becomes necessary, and the question arises: how accurate is recording in each of the various possi- ble patterns of intermittency?This brief report uses the teacher-training model to examine some quantita- tive comparisons.In teacher training, especially in preschool settings, a number of subjects will probably be in each training analysis.Some subjects may be teachers being taught behavior-management skills; other subjects may be child-students in their classes, whose behavior is pre- sumably changing as a function of the teachers' application of those behavior-management techniques.In the ideal case, one observer would continuously re- cord each subject's rates of the management skills or other relevant behaviors.For the comparison to fol- low, it was assumed that such a sharply curtailed observer budget was in force that only one observer would be available to observe four subjects.Obvi- ously, a quarter of the observer's total time could be assigned to each subject.The observer might be as- signed to four teachers, or four children, or two teach- ers and two children-in other words, any four sub- jects (or any four behavior codes).Three possible patterns of such assignments are described; for convenience, these are based on a 64-min session potentially divisible into sixteen 4-min segments of observation.One simple and straightforward method, labelled Contiguous, would assign the first quarter of the pe- riod (16 min) to observation of Subject 1, the next 'This project