What is Mangold INTERACT video coding software

What is Mangold INTERACT?

Mangold INTERACT is a professional software platform for deductive and inductive data collection and qualitative analysis of multimedia files. Designed specifically for observational research, it provides a structured, flexible, and highly accurate way to capture, code, and analyze behavior from video, audio, or live observation.

At its core, INTERACT supports the fundamental research workflow: pose a question, collect data to answer it, and present an answer. INTERACT is the engine for that critical middle step - turning raw recordings into meaningful, analyzable data.

Whether you call it “video coding,” “event logging,” “content analysis,” “qualitative analysis,” “video rating,” or “tagging” - INTERACT handles all of it under one roof, with over 35 years of continuous development behind it.

“The video coding software we used throughout the project provided us with timelines enabling us to visualise how the play states of each child changed over time and in relation to other events and behaviors.”

• Nicola Yuill, Technology to Support Children’s Collaborative Interactions (Springer, 2021)

How INTERACT Works: Step by Step

INTERACT follows a logical research workflow - from loading your media to generating publication-ready statistics.

Step 1 - Load Your Video or Audio

Open any number of video files simultaneously - all remain perfectly synchronized. INTERACT supports footage from digital camcorders, IP cameras, action cams, webcams, and smartphones (Android and iPhone). Videos can be played forward and reverse at virtually any speed, including frame-by-frame for precise timing.

The audio waveform can be displayed alongside the video - particularly useful in studies where rare vocal events (such as speech in autism research) are buried in long stretches of silence. Instead of watching hours of footage, you can spot and jump directly to any vocalization.

Step 2 - Define Your Coding System

Build a category or coding system of any size and complexity - with unlimited codes, branches, and hierarchy levels. For example, the full Facial Action Coding System (FACS) fits neatly into just 3 hierarchy levels in INTERACT. Each code is assigned a keyboard shortcut for fast, hands-free data entry during playback.

Not ready to define a system yet? INTERACT also supports a zero-config approach for inductive, exploratory observation - start logging immediately and build your category system as patterns emerge.

Step 3 - Code & Capture Events

Watch the video and log behaviors with a single key press or mouse click - even while the video is paused. Each logged event stores a start time, end time, and one or more behavioral codes. You can:

• Add unlimited free-text transcriptions to any event
• Attach external files (PDFs, spreadsheets, text documents) directly to events via drag and drop
• Code the same video in multiple passes, focusing on different behaviors each time
• Add new codes to your system at any point without disrupting existing data

INTERACT supports both interval-based sessions (Time Sampling) and event-based sessions (Event Sampling). All data is stored in a structured .xiact file and can be manually edited at any time.

Step 4 - Structure & Enrich Your Data

Organize events into datasets - by subject, condition, or session. Add custom metadata variables (age, sex, group, condition) to each dataset for powerful post-hoc filtering. INTERACT offers routines that automatically group events per subject or insert new datasets before specific events, making restructuring effortless even after collection.

Step 5 - Analyze & Export

Generate statistics and visualizations with a few mouse clicks. Export raw data or results to SPSS, Excel, or any tool via file export or copy-paste. For advanced workflows, the built-in Python integration (INTERACT Premium) enables fully custom analysis pipelines callable directly from the menu bar.

Key Features

Analysis & Statistics

The true power of INTERACT lies not in its data collection - impressive as that is - but in what it can reveal from the data once collected. Many behavioral patterns are impossible to detect through observation alone, because the human brain cannot reliably track multiple simultaneous streams of behavior.

INTERACT solves this with a layered approach to information mining:

Co-occurrence analysis answers questions like “How often do behaviors A and B happen at the same time?” Code each behavior independently (which is faster and more accurate), then let INTERACT calculate their overlap automatically - generating new events that can be analyzed further.

Sequence and contingency analysis reveals what behaviors tend to follow others, progressively building more complex insights from originally simple codes. This is exactly what makes INTERACT uniquely valuable.

Inter-rater reliability is built in, with support for Cohen’s Kappa and the Intra-Class Correlation Coefficient (ICC), so you can validate data quality with a few clicks.

Timeline Charts plot all logged events on a horizontal axis - click any point on the chart and all your synchronized videos jump to that exact moment.

State Space Grids (SSG) offer an additional perspective for examining dynamic behavioral relationships over time.

Who Uses INTERACT?

INTERACT is used wherever video-based observational research takes place. Its flexibility makes it equally suited to the structured protocols of clinical psychology and the open-ended exploration of ethnographic field research. Current application areas include:

• Developmental Psychology
• Organizational & Work Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Teaching & Learning Research
• Ethology
• Human Factors Research
• UX & Usability Research
• Market & Product Research
• Therapy
• Autism Research
• Linguistics & Transcription Studies
• Political Science
• Educational Science

Why Choose INTERACT?

The research software market offers many tools for basic video annotation, but INTERACT occupies a distinct position: it is purpose-built for the full observational research workflow, not adapted from a general-purpose tool.

Methodological freedom. INTERACT does not impose a particular observation method. Interval-based and event-based sessions are both supported. Inductive and deductive approaches work equally well. Your methodology shapes the software, not the other way around.

Depth of analysis. Basic tools stop at frequency counts. INTERACT goes further - co-occurrence, sequence, contingency, reliability - revealing relationships in your data that would otherwise remain invisible.

35+ years of domain expertise. Every feature traces back to a real research need surfaced over decades of collaboration with scientists, clinicians, and educators. The result is a tool where edge cases have been thought through, because they’ve been lived through.

INTERACT: One Software for Your Entire Observational Research Workflow

From audio/video-based content-coding and transcription to analysis - INTERACT has you covered.

Explore INTERACT