ANALYZING FAMILY-INTERACTION - TAKING TIME INTO ACCOUNT

Recent advances in hardware and software have made the coding and anal yzing of family interaction an easier task. The availability of relati vely inexpensive devices that preserve time as part of the record make s the coding of onset and offset times of a variety of behavioral even ts feasible. Such data can be represented as timed-event sequences thr ough Sequential Data Interchange Standard conventions and analyzed wit h a computer program designed for sequential analysis (the Generalized Sequential Querier). Coding units (entities coded, such as events) ne ed not be the same as tallying units (entities counted, such as second s); in fact, much can be gained by regarding them separately. Examples of both time-based reliability assessment and sequential analysis, an d lagged event-based log-linear analysis, are presented.