The Practicalities and Perils of Ambulatory Assessment's Promise: Introduction to a Special Section

Abstract

Ambulatory assessment (AA) offers one of the most exciting approaches for opening the dynamic “black box” of adolescents’ daily lives. In this introduction, we spotlight AA's surprisingly restricted market share within adolescent scholarship. We describe thorny challenges these intense methods can pose when conducting adolescent research “in situ” and underscore that capturing quality AA data means placing adolescents’ developmental stage at the forefront. The novel research reported in this special section speaks to these challenges and underscores the promise of AA for conducting developmentally salient science. The nine articles included in the section span multiple disciplines (Sociology, Psychology, Public Health) and reflect diverse viewpoints, approaches, and theories. All provide multiple novel best‐practice strategies for conducting AA scholarship with adolescents.

Annual Research Review: Ecological momentary assessment studies in child psychology and psychiatry

“…These include direct methods (e.g., clearly stated financial contingencies and bonus payments) and more indirect methods – for example, recent work suggests that gamification , defined as ‘the use of game design elements in non‐game contexts’ (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, ), is associated with increased quantity and quality of data collected in EMA protocols with adults (Van Berkel, Goncalves, Hosio, & Kostakos, ). As the percentage of adolescents with a smartphone increases (Anderson & Jiang, ), EMA protocols will need to adapt to capture youths' attention (Modecki, Goldberg, Ehrenreich, Russell, & Bellmore, ; Odgers, ).…”

Technology can sting when reality bites: Adolescents’ frequent online coping is ineffective with momentary stress

“…Data were collected in groups of 20-25 youth per week between late 2013-mid 2016 in two school cohorts. Groups were staggered to allow sufficient resource allocation (e.g., smartphones and research team attention; Modecki et al, 2019). Prior to beginning the ESM phase, participants completed a computerized baseline survey (pre-ESM survey) which included items tapping demographics and a range of constructs, including adapted online coping questions, psychopathology, lifestressors, and well-being.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Advances in handheld computing (e.g., PDAs, smartphones) led to an explosion in daily life research in the 2000s, using what are now collectively referred to as ambulatory assessment (AA) methods (Trull & Ebner-Priemer, 2014). 1 Several previous special issues, including one in this journal (Westmeyer, 2007) have covered AA (e.g., Kubiak & Stone, 2012;Schimmack & Diener, 2003) and its application to diverse subfields, including clinical psychology (Trull & Ebner-Priemer, 2009), addiction (Tomko & McClure, 2018), health psychology (Shiffman & Stone, 1998), and adolescent development (Modecki, Goldberg, Ehrenreich, Russell, & Bellmore, 2019). These special issues highlight the strengths of AA methods: capturing dynamic psychological processes in everyday life, thus providing a different perspective than traditional laboratory and global/ retrospective questionnaire methods.…”