Brief Experience Sampling Primer

Covering experience sampling, EMA, and other intensive longitudinal methods

Preface

Intensive longitudinal methods enable us to study thoughts, feelings, and behaviour as they unfold in everyday life. This brief primer covers experience sampling (ESM), ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and related designs from study planning to data analysis. It is written for graduate students and new researchers. It assumes familiarity with regression, but no prior experience with multilevel models.

Contents

The chapters generally follow the lifecycle of a study:

Chapter	Stage	Covers
1  Foundations	Foundations	Terms, strengths and limits of the methods
2  Research design	Design	Research questions, timescale, sampling schemes, design parameters
3  Measurement and questionnaire design	Measure	Momentary items, response formats, reliability, passive data
4  Study setup and data collection	Collect	Platforms, ethics, briefing, monitoring, piloting
5  Data processing	Process	Compliance, careless responding, lags, centering, descriptives
6  Data analysis	Analyse	Multilevel, autoregressive, dynamic and person-specific models

All analyses in this primer use the same simulated dataset (100 people, 14 days, 6 prompts a day, measuring stress and negative affect). The code that generates it is in Appendix A — Simulated dataset, and every R chunk in 5  Data processing and 6  Data analysis runs when the book is rendered, so the code output that you see always comes directly from the code shown.

Colour conventions

Throughout the book, blue marks between-person quantities (differences between people’s averages) and amber marks within-person quantities (fluctuations around a person’s own average).