R help - Jun 2011 - Activity budgets with multiple proportions as response

Hi everyone,

I've searched the internet and lots of stats books high and low for this
one, but nothing seems to be quite what I want. I've got continuous data on
four different state activities recorded in seconds, however each continuous
session is not equally long, so the data are best expressed as proportions,
i.e.: Subject 1: Swimming, 0.5, Hiding, 0.25, Edge, 0.125, Inactive, 0.125 and
so on for each subject. I have two fixed effects and a possible random effect
that may only have a very small influence on the end results. The four response
variables are obviously not independent as they are a proportion of the total.
The data are not normal, even when arcsine transformed from proportions where
only the response variable with the highest proportion comes close (that being
swimming).

I have used four separate binomial glms with each response variable (in seconds
rather than as a proportion) against total time, but I'd rather incorporate
them all into one model somehow. I thought about doing a manova, but I'm
pretty sure lots of assumptions aren't met. For one, the response variables
aren't independent.

It confuses me that it's so hard for me to analyse this data, as I assumed
it would be relatively straight forward. Any ideas?

Best regards,

Freya

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