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2 Ecological Momentary Assessment Arthur A. Stone) Saul S. Shiffman) and Marten W DeVries The purpose of this chapter is to describe the significant problems with standard retrospective questionnaires and interviews that challenge the validity of such reports. Information emerging from cognitive science investigations highlights processes that can affect recall when we attempt to remember and/or summarize past experiences. Only rarely do selfreport assessments take this information into account. We argue that one alternative method for collecting accurate data is to tallJet multiple, immediate reports from people in their typical environments . Many examples of such studies are presented to document the detailed, dynamic information that such data collection methodologies afford. We expect that Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) methods will be used more commonly in the future and will provide new insights into daily life. A VAST AMOUNT OF behavioral science research, especially psychological research, is conducted each year using self-report questionnaire and interview methodologies. Collecting information by having people report on their attitudes, current feelings, state of their mental health, opinions about various matters, and scores of other topics has proved useful and practical and has the virtue of a high degree of face validity. Despite these strengths and the overall acceptance of the methods, we argue that recent research indicates there are many potential problems with the self-report method as it is currently implemented. Methods of collecting information that do not rely on people's ability to summarize their thoughts and feelings over substantial time periods provide an alternative. With "momentary" methods, individuals are asked to report on what is happening at the moment in their typical environment. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) was developed as a way to study individuals' experiences in their natural environment by means of signaled random assessments. Each assessment entailed the completion of a brief questionnaire. Assessments were typically completed several times a day for many days. In 1994 Stone and Shiffman introduced another term, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), which was intended to capture not only experience but all phenomena measured on a momentary basis in subjects' natural environment (Stone and Shiffman 1994). In particular , technological advances have allowed a number of physiological tests to be measured on an ambulatory basis. (Several are discussed later.) The two terms denote the same fundamental notions of examining momentary phenomena in the natural environment, and paying particular attention to the timing of measurements, though the focus of ESM is somewhat narrower than that of EMA. We first present a brief history of the developments leading up to the advent of momentary reporting strategies. A summary of research highlighting retrospective recall biases, one of the main reasons for moving to momentary reports, is next presented. This is followed by a brief section about the potential uses of EMA, and the chapter concludes with descriptions of several EMA studies. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE The development of experience sampling was a response to a number of currents within psychology and medical and social science research. From a research perspective, experience sampling grew out of the dissatisfaction with the increasingly demonstrated inability of people to provide accurate retrospective information about their daily behavior and experience (discussed more fully later). Clinically, the need to move toward ecologically valid information that went beyond interviews and key informant approaches, as well as beyond laboratory tests, became pressing.I The shortcoming in clinical research was that patients and their symptoms were inadequately understood in the context of daily community life, and therefore the places and social contexts were not available for clinical reasoning. At the University of Chicago, landmark studies in adolescents (Csikszentmihalyi and Lar- son 1984) and optimal experience or "flow" (Csikszentmihalyi 1994) took on the challenge of studying normal states of consciousness in everyday life in order to understand the interactions between the states of optimal and aversive experience . Other direct antecedents of ESM came from developmental psychology (Barker 1978), ethology (Hinde 1992), sociology (Szalai, Converse, and Feldheim 1972), and anthropology (Gross 1984). In the ethnography of Malinowski (1935), the use of time budgeting and sampling in order to detect societal patterns and regularities was already evident . Time observations formed the basis of biological and ethological research with animals during the middle of this century. Systematic time observation techniques in naturalistic field studies with humans soon followed animal studies (Chapple 1970; Monroe and Monroe 1971). The Kansas School of Ecological Research, for example, pioneered the use of time allocation observational techniques in investigating the behavioral settings of importance to the socialization of...

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