Students' Experiences with Ecological Momentary Assessment Tools to Report on Emotional Well-being

Abstract

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) methods have emerged as an approach that enhances the ecological validity of data collected for the study of human behavior and experience. In particular, EMA methods are used to capture individuals' experiences (e.g., symptoms, affect, and behaviors) in real-world contexts and in near-real time. However, work investigating participants' experiences in EMA studies and in particular, how these experiences may influence the collected data, is limited. We conducted in-depth focus groups with 32 participants following an EMA study on mental well-being in college students. In doing so, we probed how the elicitation of high-quality, reflective responses is related to the design of EMA interactions. Through our study, we distilled three primary considerations for designing EMA interactions, based on observations of 1) response strategies to repeated questions, 2) the perceived burden of EMA prompts, and 3) challenges to the validity and robustness of EMA data. We present these considerations in the context of two microinteraction-based EMA approaches that we tested: lock-screen EMA and image-based question prompts. We conclude by characterizing design tensions in the presentation and delivery of EMA prompts, and outline directions for future work to address these tensions.

PuzzleWalk: A theory-driven iterative design inquiry of a mobile game for promoting physical activity in adults with autism spectrum disorder

“…Given the difficulty of reporting one's PA status in a retrospective manner, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) method is a promising method to mitigate this challenge. We plan to apply EMA in future studies [112,113].…”

Automated sensing of daily activity: A new lens into development

“…The latter can provide much higher dimensional data and may be less burdensome than traditional methods (see, e.g., the use of images in place of food diaries; Cordeiro, Bales, Cherry, & Fogarty, ). With such novel methods, certain caution is required when addressing data validity (Chan et al, ). While EMA has historically not been subject to the same standards as traditional questionnaires within psychology, experts in EMA design now emphasize these concerns (Stone, ; Stone & Shiffman, ), recommending, for example, that a minimum of three items be used to address individual constructs when examining within‐person across‐time variation (Bolger & Laurenceau, ; Cranford et al, ).…”

“…Active-sensing techniques which require participants to actively log data or responses are the gold standard for ambulatory assessment of affect and internal experiences (Ebner-Priemer & Trull, 2009; Mehl & Conner, 2011). Repeated surveying of subjective experience, also referred to as ecological momentary assessment (EMA), was pioneered in the 1980s by Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues (Csikczentmihalyi & Larson, 1983;Shiffman, Stone, & Hufford, 2008) and is now a well-established method within psychology (Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013 (Chan et al, 2018). While EMA has historically not been subject to the same standards as traditional questionnaires within psychology, experts in EMA design now emphasize these concerns (Stone, 2017;Stone & Shiffman, 2002), recommending, for example, that a minimum of three items be used to address individual constructs when examining within-person across-time variation (Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013;Cranford et al, 2006).…”

A human-centered wearable sensing platform with intelligent automated data annotation capabilities

“…Thus, AL approaches ask for an annotation only when the uncertainty levels are below a threshold [19]. Most of these approaches do not limit the number of annotations requested per day [7]. AL based approaches have been underutilized in many current applications, diet monitoring included.…”