-- No Subject --

[Catherine Snow]

Anne,

it may not be necessary to pay any attention to the time and activity
indicators.  They are in the transcripts because, in the original
analyses we did, we wanted to establish a ten-minute time basis for
purposes of comparing children on number of communicative acts and on
numbers of various speech acts produced, as well as using the 10-mins
as a basis for counting words, different words, and so on.  But many
analysts prefer to take measures of child ability as a ratio to total
utterances, which is also fine.  Similarly, the activity deliminators
are there so that individual analyses can focus on or exclude
specific activities.  Some analyses may function better, for example,
if book-reading is excluded, or if all the children are compared on
peek-a-boo.  But those would be rather specialized analyses designed
around specific questions, and for many purposes you could just
ignore the indicators totally.

I hope this helps,

Catherine

On Tue, 30 May 2000 11:44:11 +1000 Anne Kolatsis
<anne.kolatsis at mailbox.uq.edu.au> wrote:

> I am working with the New England database and am interested to know how
> others have dealt with time and activity deliminators.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to work with individual
> activities inside transcripts.
>
> How to work with calculating time elapsed for individual activities and/or
> whole transcripts?
>
> Any suggestions will be much appreciated
> ****************************************
> Anne Kolatsis
> The Graduate School of Education
> The University of Queensland
> St Lucia, 4072  Queensland
> AUSTRALIA
> ph: +6 (7)3365 6395
> fax:+6 (7)3365 7199
> e-mail: anne.kolatsis at mailbox.uq.edu.au
> ****************************************
>
>
>

----------------------------------------
Catherine Snow
Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Larsen 3
Cambridge, MA 02138
tel:  617 - 495 3563
fax:  617 - 495 5771
New email address: Snowcat at gse.harvard.edu
               or: Catherine_Snow at harvard.edu