ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the procedures that permit students of nonverbal behavior to reduce observed behavior to scores that can be analyzed. Typically, coding schemes used in research on nonverbal behavior require human judgment and cannot be automated as, for example, the position of an animal in an enclosure or a person's physiological responses might be. Coding schemes, which can be thought of as measuring instruments just like rulers and thermometers, are central to observational methods. In contrast with both self-report or questionnaire methods, and more similar with automatic collection of physiological data, observational methods often result in voluminous data. The study of social interaction generally and interactional synchrony in particular are two areas in which observational methods have been used widely. Observers are not always passive or hidden, and situations are often contrived, and yet the behavior captured by observational methods seems freer to unfold, reflecting more the target's volition, than seems the case with, for example, self-report questionnaires.
