Real-time, passive measurement of communication during family leisure: An exploratory study of wearable sociometric badges

Abstract

Research on family communication in the leisure context has been limited to retrospective survey reconstructions of perceptions of communication patterns. This study examines the validity of sociometric badges for measuring family communication in real-time. Seven families (married, two-parent families with at least one child ages 4–17 years) wore sociometric badges during a 30-minute leisure activity in a lab setting. We compared mean badge estimates of family communication duration to mean coded video data from the same 30-minute sessions. Intraclass correlation coefficients indicated sociometric badges are not as reliable as video-coded estimates of speech; however, among parents, non-significant mean comparisons partially support the validity of sociometric badges. Deviation scores indicated average differences between the two methods to be less than three minutes. We urge scholars to proceed with cautious optimism if using sociometric badges for real-time communication data collection, and to pair badges with other data collection methods.