Structural analysis of verbal data

  • Authors:
  • Wayne A. Bailey;Edwin J. Kay

  • Affiliations:
  • Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR;Lehigh Univ., Bethlehem, PA

  • Venue:
  • CHI '87 Proceedings of the SIGCHI/GI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and Graphics Interface
  • Year:
  • 1986

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Abstract

Current methods of analyzing verbal reports (Protocol Analysis) from human-computer interactions fall short of their potential. Although there are systematic methods for collecting complete and objective verbal reports applicable to a broad range of problem-solving tasks, currently available analyses of verbal reports are ad hoc and apply only to well constrained tasks. Structural Analysis is a systematic method, currently under development, for analyzing real-world tasks involving human-computer interaction. Starting with a rule that assigns utterances to two dichotomous categories related to a behavior of interest, rules are generated that expose the goal building and evaluation underlying that behavior. The resulting data yield time distributions that characterize subjects' goal-directed behavior and that allow comparisons among tasks or among subjects.