Psychologists Use Non-Expert Student Observers In Autism Research

[HuckleB]

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/176873.php

"...

The study used 188 non-expert students to observe the interactions of 38 parents and their six-month old infants, 20 of whom had older siblings with autism spectrum diagnoses and were considered high risk, and 18 of whom did not have a sibling with autism and were used as a control group.

The parents were asked to play with their child for three minutes and then to keep a still emotionless face for two minutes. The idea was to measure the infant's interactions and how their emotions changed in response to the unusual situation.

Each video was observed and rated by the students. The non-experts were shown the video files and were told to use the joystick provided to rate the emotional state of the subject in the video. A graduated color bar was provided with a neutral tic mark. Ratings above the tic mark indicated positive emotion (joy, happiness, pleasure). Ratings below the mark indicated negative emotion (distress, sadness, anger).The interactions were monitored and recorded by the non-experts.

The experiment showed that when the parents became emotionless, the babies who were at risk showed less positive emotion compared to the infants who were not at risk. Comparing pooled results from as few as 10 non-experts to results from expert coders showed a high correlation between the two groups, demonstrating that small groups of student can effectively gain similar outcomes to the coders who have gone through extensive training.

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I remember reading about some similar studies being done with groups of researchers and non-experts observing children in home videos. The home videos were of children later diagnosed with schizophrenia, I believe. And both groups were asked to identify which child in the videos (of birthday parties, etc...) seemed to be "different," or some such label. I believe the non-expert group did as well as, if not better, than the researcher group in identifying the children who later developed schizophrenia.