Twenty-five adolescents reported their daily activities and the quality of their experiences for a total of 753 times during a normal week, in response to random beeps transmitted by an electronic paging device. In this sample adolescents were found to spend most of their time either in conversation with peers or in watching television. Negative affects were prevalent in most activities involving socialization into adult roles. Television viewing appears to be an affectless state associated with deviant behavior and antisocial personality traits. The research suggests the importance of a systemic approach which studies persons' activities and experiences in an ecological context. The experiential sampling method described in this paper provides a tool for collecting such systemic data.

No abstract

This study is a follow up on the study done by Sara Schwabacher (1 972). All the articles in this siudy were taken from the journal of Personal-157

Twenty professionals, half men and half women, half above and half below the age of thirty, were signaled at random during their normal waking hours by an electronic paging device or "beeper" over the course of a week. Self reports on seven cognitive and affective measures were analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance. Environment was demonstrated to have a highly significant impact on respondents' reports. Age and sex within age group effects as well as significant interactions between environment and age and sex appeared. A characteristic profile of life experiences of professionals emerged in which there appeared significant contrasts in cognitive and affective states, particularly at home and work, but in recreation and transportation as well. The research is introduced as a new method for examining personality in the normal range of environments which persons typically inhabit. The results serve to reinforce the belief that personality is not expressed consistently across environments, and underscores the limitations of measuring personality in a single and often atypical testing situation. The introduction of this new method provides some promise for advancing personality research through providing a more representative picture of persons' typical experience than has been possible previously.

No abstract