Target Audience: This is the intended viewing audience for the video. When appropriate, we have modified the producers' own description for greater accuracy.

Year Released and Running Time: This information was obtained from the video itself or from promotional materials accompanying the video. Sometimes videos are updated or re-edited. Be sure to check with the video distributor about the most recent release.

Speech Rate: This is the average (mean) number of words spoken in one minute. A normal speech rate is approximately 150 words per minute. Social psychological research suggests that slightly faster speech may result in audience perceptions that the speaker is more intelligent, more knowledgeable, and even more sincere. This effect can vary depending on your audience. For example, the normal rate of speech is slower in some geographic regions and faster in others, and non-native speakers may have trouble understanding rapid speech.

Use of Large Words: This variable provides a rough indicator of the difficulty-level of the video's vocabulary. We defined large words as those with four or more syllables. For each video, we report the average (mean) number of large words per segment. As an indicator of the consistency of vocabulary level throughout the video, we also report the minimum and maximum number of large words we counted in any one segment.

Purchase/Rental Price: This information was obtained from the video distributor. Be sure to check for the current price before ordering.

Distributor Information: This is the company or organization from which copies of the video can be obtained.

Description and Critique: This is a concise summary of the video's content and major topics, with some of our own opinions and comments about the video. We have tried to note the video's strengths as well as possible limitations on its usefulness with particular audiences.

Technical Quality: Comments about the production quality are included for most videos. For some videos, overall technical quality is summarized with one of the following key words:

• Excellent. A broadcast-quality, highly professional production.
• Good. Professional quality, designed primarily for classroom-style use, not broadcast.
• Adequate. A work that is not of professional quality, but has no major technical flaws that detract from the video's overall educational mission.
• Poor. A production with technical problems that interfere with the video's educational message (e. g. , portions of unintelligible sound, muddy or unclear video images, illegible graphics).

Notes

For coding purposes, we divided each video into 15 segments of approximately equal duration.

The speech rate was calculated by counting the actual number of words spoken in the first ten seconds of each segment, multiplying each count by six (to extrapolate from the 10-second interval to a one-minute interval), and then summing the counts and dividing by 15 (the number of segments). Back to text

The number of large words was calculated in a manner similar to the computation of speech rate. We counted the actual number of large words in the first ten seconds of each segment, multiplied that number by six (to extrapolate from the 10-second interval to a one-minute interval), summed across segments and divided by 15 (the number of segments). Back to text

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Introduction to Video AIDS Online

Table of Contents for Video AIDS Online