SHAPA: an interactive software environment for protocol analysis

Abstract

This paper briefly reviews work on verbal report and describes SHAPA, an interactive program for performing both verbal and non-verbal protocol analysis. To a certain extent, SHAPA is to protocol data what a spreadsheet program is to numerical data or what a word processor is to text it is intelligent about the sorts of things a researcher might want to do with verbal or non-verbal protocols, while being blind to particular domains, contexts, or theories. It has been developed with the idea of affording the researcher the closest possible degree of engagement with protocol data. The researcher can configure SHAPA to encode protocols using a wide variety of theoretical frameworks or vocabularies. SHAPA allows protocol analysis to be performed at any level of analysis, and it supplies many tools for data aggregation, manipulation and analysis. Some of these tools have been imported from a tradition of work on non-verbal protocol analysis that has developed very strong analytical tools. The output generated by SHAPA can be used alone or in combination with other performance variables to get a rich picture of the influences on sequences of verbal or non-verbal behaviour.

Keywords:

• Protocol analysis
• Verbal protocols
• Data analysis