Understanding the Office: Using Ecological Momentary Assessment to Measure Activities, Posture, Social Interactions, Mood, and Work Performance at the Workplace

Abstract

Studying the workplace often involves using observational, self-report recall, or focus group tools, which all have their established advantages and disadvantages. There is, however, a need for a readily available, low-invasive method that can provide longitudinal, repeated, and concurrent in-the-moment information to understand the workplace well. In this study, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) was used to collect 508 real-time responses about activities, posture, work performance, social interactions, and mood in 64 adult office workers in three Australian workplaces. The response rate was 53%, and the time to fill out the survey was 50 seconds on average. On average, the participants were sitting, standing, and walking in 84%, 9%, and 7% of survey instances, respectively. The participants reported they were working alone at their desks in 55% of all reported instances. Reported mood varied up to nine points within one person over the course of the post-occupancy observations. EMA can be used to paint a rich picture of occupants’ experiences and perceptions and to gain invaluable understanding of temporal patterns of the workplace, how the space is used, and how aspects of the workplace interact. This information can be used to make improvements to the physical and social workspaces and enhance occupants’ work performance and mood.

A randomized community trial to advance digital epidemiological and mHealth citizen scientist compliance: A smart platform study

“…Moreover, the population under investigation could be a major determinant of compliance as well. For instance, the sole motivation of our sample, which was recruited from a University population (i.e., apparently asymptomatic population), was to provide data for the greater purpose of understanding population active living behaviors, while symptomatic individuals (i.e., patients) are potentially more likely to adhere to the EMA study protocols because they understand the immediate benefits of participation, which include improved health outcomes [ 16 , 20 ]. It is important to understand unique conditions of each EMA study protocol to set expectations and maximize compliance.…”

Introducing the DizzyQuest: an app-based diary for vestibular disorders

“…It was hypothesized that not all administered questionnaires would be completed. A desired response rate of > 50% was used, since reported response rates in current literature about momentary assessments are often higher than 50% [49,50]. To calculate whether response rates of the DizzyQuest questionnaires were significantly different from the > 50% desired response rate [47,51], a one-sample T test was performed.…”

Spacematch: Using environmental preferences to match occupants to suitable activity-based workspaces

“…Prompts were configured such that the application nudged users to provide feedback at the start, finish, and once every half an hour of a typical two-hour work session. This miniature survey is a type of ecological momentary assessment, a method for longitudinal data collection pioneered in medicine and psychology [37] and recently adapted more for environmental perception [38].…”