What is Mangold INTERACT?

INTERACT offers a variety of user friendly methods to collect your observations in a structured way. It can be used for inductive, explorative observation collection as well as for deductive, coding system-based observations.

In fact, it can be used to collect any kind of time-related observations or occurrences. INTERACT is able to handle date and time information from 9999 years BC until 9999 year AC.

INTERACT offers a load of descriptive statistics alongside very powerful analysis routines to get the most of your data. Should that not be enough, exporting statistics as well as the raw data is easy, and with the full Python integration the sky is the limit of what you can achieve.

With INTERACT, you do not need to be a multimedia professional to handle multiple videos simultaneously because it does that out of the box.

You can code your videos (or live-observation) simply by a mouse- or keyboard-click. You can start right-away using the zero-config approach or define a code- or category-system. During an observational session you log time information and corresponding descriptions in so-called ‘events’. 

Those Events are represented by single lines containing both a start and an end times. Each Event can hold one or more behavioral codes to identify and categorize the behavior of that specific time interval. INTERACT offers multiple coding modes and additional coding options that, in combination with a clever setup in the code definitions, allow for the implementation of very complex coding systems. 

INTERACT can be used for interval-based sessions (Time Sampling) as well as event-based sessions (Event Sampling). The collected data is stored in a data file (*.xiact) with a spread sheet like- structure of lines and columns. It shows the time information for each event in the first two columns and the corresponding code(s) in the same line. This information can be edited by hand at any time.

For example, you want to observe a mother playing with her child. You want to analyze the child's behavior and its reactions to the mother's behavior. Supposing that you want to do so in a deductive way, using predefined codes that describe the kind of behavior you want to log,  you have to implement that code system in INTERACT.

Presume we need codes for “mother smiling”, and "mother gaze to infant", or “infant looking at mother”.

For this, we open the Code Definitions and add those codes to our code definition file. Adding them to classes like 'Gaze' and 'Affect' to specify the columns in which those codes are entered. Additionally, each Code is assigned to a key on your keyboard (e.g. [s] for the smiling mother, [i] for the gaze to the infant, and [m] for the infant looking at the mother).

While playing the video, each occurrence of a behavior of interest is easily logged by a simple mouse click or by pressing a key on your keyboard. INTERACT offers full control of your video(s), either while fast-forwarding, playing in slow-motion, or even frame-by-frame for accurate timing!

You can replay the video as often as necessary and add more codes on the fly. You can also log additional test persons or different situations and reorder the collected data in whichever way you want – everything is flexible.

The Mangold INTERACT software offers a lot of possibilities to visualize and analyze your data. For example, there are descriptive statistics, contingency analysis, sequence analysis, inter-rater-reliability and much more. 

Simply export your data to integrate them in other programs such as SPSS and Excel. Also, “Copy and Paste” your results easily into other programs to create attractive reports.