Poster #41 - Coding social interactions in naturalistic settings: The Taxonomy of Dyadic Conversation

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

Social interaction and conversation are essential aspects of human behavior, yet existing methods for coding conversations are outdated, and often can only be used in contrived research settings. This is particularly true for developmental research and examining caregiver-child interactions. The Taxonomy of Dyadic Conversation (TDC) is a refurbished version of Robinson and Eyberg’s (1981) Dyadic Parent-Child Interaction Coding System (DPICS). The TDC broadens the application opportunities of the original DPICS through the modification of speech categories, as well as the addition of conversational turn observations. These revisions allowed the TDC to be used outside of a clinical environment, and in the context of a natural, non-contrived research setting, including an interactive children’s museum. Here, we test the TDC on a large sample of caregiver-child interactions in a museum as well as with adult-adult conversations in a formal webinar. In both settings, interactions are coded for amount of questions, statements, commands, conversational turns, and other dyadic markers. As such, both the quantity (amount of utterances by each speaker) and quality of utterances (questions vs. statements, conversations turns) are captured.
Results suggest that the TDC successfully captures the quantity of utterances and turn-taking exchanges within an interaction (see Table 1). Quality is also captured as the distribution of speech categories vary across settings; e.g. educational prompts lead to more questions and higher conversational turns than free play settings, 𝜒2 (2)=18.35, p<.001. Additionally, the TDC is robust across settings, hypotheses, and raters, leaving little room for ambiguity, even while observing interactions in vivo. A mean, two-way, random absolute effects Intraclass Correlation Model (ICC) analysis also suggests that the TDC requires relatively little training and is highly reliable across raters (see Table 2). Thus, the TDC offers an updated model for capturing dyadic conversations in developmental work. The expansion of a dyadic coding system outside of clinical settings creates an opportunity for interdisciplinary exploration into the subtleties and nuances of conversation in a variety of dyadic compositions and social environments. Importantly, such a coding scheme can be easily adapted to a multitude of research settings across various ages, settings, and topics and used reliably in both recorded and naturalistic settings where video/audio taping may not be feasible.

Authors

• Kenya Mulwa

• Sarah C Kucker, Southern Methodist University
  Presenting Author