Analyzing family interaction: Taking time into account.

Recent advances in hardware and software have made the coding and analyzing of family interaction an easier task. The availability of relatively inexpensive devices that preserve time as part of the record makes the coding of onset and offset times of a variety of behavioral events feasible. Such data can be represented as timed-event sequences through Sequential Data Interchange Standard conventions and analyzed with a computer program designed for sequential analysis (the Generalized Sequential Querier). Coding units (entities coded, such as events) need not be the same as tallying units (entities counted, such as seconds) ; in fact, much can be gained by regarding them separately. Examples of both time-based reliability assessment and sequential analysis, and lagged event-based log-linear analysis, are presented.