The Experience Sampling Method

Abstract

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is a research procedure for studying what people do, feel, and think during their daily lives, It consists in asking individuals to provide systematic self-reports at random occasions during the waking hours of a normal week. Sets of these self-reports from a sample of individuals create an archival file of daily experience. Using this file, it becomes possible to address such questions as these: How do people spend their time? What do they usually feel like when engaged in various activities? How do men and women, adolescents and adults, disturbed and normal samples differ in their daily psychological states? This chapter describes the Experience Sampling Method and illustrates its use for studying a broad range of issues.The origins of interest in daily experience and the origins of the method can be traced to numerous sources within the field of psychology. One of the earliest spokespersons for the scientific study of everyday life was Kurt Lewin (1935Lewin ( , 1936, who advocated investigation of the ''topology'' of daily activity. He believed that, by examining the psychological life space, it would be possible to understand the forces that structure daily thought and behavior. Regrettably, Lewin did not have a method for studying daily experience, and his American followers (for example, Roger Barker, Herbert Wright, P. V. Gump) turned to a behavioral H. T. Reis (Ed.), New Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Sciences (vol. 15,. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Ó 1983 Wiley imprint-Republished with permission.

Associations between financial stress and interpersonal events: A daily diary study of middle-aged adults and their life circumstances.

“…Consequently, our results should be interpreted with this caution in mind and future research may be valuable to further tease apart the temporal and causal associations between distinct domains in which stress may occur. To this end, use of multiple observations per day, as in the case of experience sampling methods (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1983), could yield a greater ability to draw causal inference from these examined relationships.…”

Consensual Relationships in the Academic Field: A Phenomenological Understanding

“…All informants come from XXX University within the ambit of tertiary education. A combination of purposive sampling and experience sampling Method, as proposed by Larson and Csikszentmihalyi [14] was used. For one to be part of the study the criterion must be met:…”

Ubiquitous Connectivity and Students’ Wellbeing: a Situational Analysis in a UK University

“…Six additional students (5 females and 1 male) were involved in a third phase using the same principle adopted in the Experience Sampling Method (Hektner, Schmidt, and Csikszentmihalyi 2007;Larson and Csikszentmihalyi 1983). A phone application was installed on their smartphones and they were asked to use it for 5-7 days near an assignment deadline to record their thoughts (via audio or text) every time they had an experience connected in some way to the use of technology in relation to learning.…”