IMPROVING THE ENCODING OF VERBAL REPORTS BY USING MPAS - A COMPUTER-AIDED ENCODING SYSTEM

The dramatically increased use of verbal report methodologies in psych ological research has created a need for new tools to improve the effi ciency and reliability of encoding these data. A computer-aided protoc ol encoding system called MPAS (Multiple Protocol Analysis System) pre sents individual protocol segments in a randomized order to one or mor e coders and then stores computer keyboard-entered codes for later out put to an SPSS formatted data file. In the present paper, MPAS is desc ribed, and a brief example is provided of how MPAS can be used in a co ntrolled laboratory study to rigorously analyze verbal protocol data.