A large amount of psychological research today is accomplished through the coding and analysis of interpersonal interactions, individual sessions, and other recorded events. Various methods are used to code videos into data files that can be analyzed, but the majority of these methods involve multiple people watching the video of the actions and recording their observations. Better.Business.Solutions developed Better.Coding.Approach to streamline the process by integrating video playback with the coding and data entry process.
Better.Coding.Approach allows coders to concentrate on the video being coded, rather than being concerned with the time or looking away from the video to code on paper. The software is provided in versions that support both interval-based zero-one coding systems and continuous coding systems. The software was developed in collaboration with Cynthia Stifter, Ph.D., Director of the Infant and Child Temperament Lab and Professor of Human Development at Penn State University, and Jenelle Nissley-Tsiopinis, Ph.D., T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the New York University Child Study Center. The software continues to be used in research studies under their direction.
Better.Coding.Approach – Interval Coding (BCA-IC) is designed to help facilitate the coding of DVD media or supported media files using a zero-one coding system. The program will play the video for a specified number of seconds. Once the interval has elapsed, the program will pause the video and provide a screen for the coder to identify the behaviors that have occured. Multiple configurations are supported by this software to allow different coding groups to work on the same computers. The software is designed to allow the researcher to designate the length of the coding interval for each configuration. The names and number of the behaviors can also be adjusted for each coding group.
Better.Coding.Approach – Real-Time Coding (BCA-RT) helps facilitate the coding of DVD media using a continuous coding system. The program will record the time at which the mouse is clicked and/or keys pressed, without pausing the video. The behaviors may be customized to fit multiple coding systems, with multiple saved configurations available.
Both versions of the software saves each coding session in a file that can be read by many standard statistics packages, including S-plus, Excel, SAS, and SPSS. In addition, a reliability and statistics module is available from that provides the user with the ability to easily view a display of the comparison between two coders, including the Kappa Coefficient. The module also provides basic statistics and summary values for multiple coding files.
Better.Coding.Approach