Investigating the Reliability of the Dyadic Emotion Coding System (DECS)

Lauren E. Browning*, Sophia D. Shank, Christopher K. Owen, Lindsay R. Druskin, Jane Kohlhoff, and Cheryl B. McNeil
Department of Psychology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

Presentation No.: 119

Assigned Category (Presentation Format): Social & Behavioral Sciences (Poster Presentations)

Student’s Major: Psychology

A primary component of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy-Toddler (PCIT-T) includes caregiver-child emotion coaching (Girard et al., 2018). Emotion coaching helps parents deal effectively with child emotions and improve child emotion socialization (Zinsser et. al., 2021). PCIT-T would benefit from a robust and precise behavioral observation coding system to measure changes in caregiver-child emotion language. The Dyadic Emotion Coding System (DECS) was constructed to capture parental emotion language consisting of a three-part code scheme including the type of statement, type of emotion, and emotion intensity. To capture reliability, 6 caregiver-child dyads (3,039 discrete verbalizations, 198 DECS codes) were double-coded to assess for reliability. Data came from a randomized-controlled trial investigating the efficacy of PCIT-T. Participants included caregivers and their young children (i.e., 12-24 months). As an essential component of psychometric evaluation, reliability estimates quantify the consistency or precision of a measure. Overall agreement was almost perfect between two coders, κ=.837, p<.001. Thus, the DECS represents a promising measure in evaluating the efficacy of PCIT-T for teaching positive emotion socialization strategies to parents.

Funding:

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: WVU's SURE program (Rita Rio & Michelle Richards-Babb)