Cohort 1 student Romana Burgess publishes a journal article in the Journal of Non-verbal Behaviour entitled: ‘A Quantitative Evaluation of Thin Slice Sampling for Parent–Infant Interactions.’
Romana had this to say about her paper: ‘Broadly, the paper looks at whether we can use brief observations (“thin slices”) of behaviours to approximate those same behaviours over a longer period of time. The purpose of this work is to find an approach to alleviate the “coding burden”, i.e., the amount of time that researchers spend coding behaviours from observational data. In essence, behavioural coding is extremely time-intensive and laborious, and this paper both explores and quantifies the value of thin slice sampling as an alternative approach.
The analysis is based on video data of interactions between parents and their infants. These data come from two cohort studies: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) – based in Bristol – and Grown in Wales (GiW) – based in Cardiff. Some videos were recorded in a research clinic, but most were recorded in the participants own homes.
The videos were coded in 5-minute segments for a large range of behaviours, for example, vocalisations, facial expressions, and body orientation. Then, I used Markov modelling to quantify long-term patterns and transitions between behaviours for 15 distinct thin slices of the full 5-minute interactions, and I compared measures drawn from the full sessions to those from shorter slices.
The paper identified many instances where thin slice sampling was an appropriate coding approach, although there was significant variation across behaviours. From here, I was able to quantify how long is appropriate to code for each behaviour, depending on video context and individual research objectives.
This work constitutes the first project of three that comprise my PhD thesis, and is crucial to its completion. The second project considers a different approach to alleviating the coding burden, and these two works together contribute to the third project, which looks at linking coded facial expressions during parent-infant interactions to parental mental health.’
Link to Paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10919-022-00420-7