Ambulatory Assessment: Methods for Studying Everyday Life

Abstract

Ambulatory assessment is a class of methods that use mobile technology to understand people's biopsychosocial processes in natural settings, in real time, and on repeated occasions. In this essay, we discuss the rationale for ambulatory assessment including the benefits of measuring people in the real world (greater ecological validity, better understanding of people in contexts), in real time (avoidance of memory bias, greater sensitivity for capturing change), and over time (capturing within‐person patterns and temporal trends). Then, we review the latest ambulatory assessment techniques for measuring experiences, behaviors, and physiology in daily life. Experiences such as emotions, physical pain, and daily stressors can be tracked using daily diaries and smartphone‐based experience sampling. Behaviors such as activity, movement, location, and natural language use can be tracked using accelerometers, portable actigraphs, global positioning system (GPS) coordinates, and the electronically activated recorder (EAR). Physiological processes such as heart rate, blood pressure, and electrodermal activity can be measured using an array of ambulatory biosensors. Ambulatory assessment will continue to be revolutionized by smartphones, which are becoming integrated seamlessly into people's lives. Emerging trends include social sensing applications that make inferences about users' psychological processes based on multi‐channel information collected from smartphones, emergence of “big data collection” whereby ambulatory assessment data is gathered en masse from large populations, and the growing field of mobile health. These trends raise questions around the protection of participants' privacy and the synthesis of immense amounts of digital data. Ultimately, these developments will narrow the separation between science and everyday life as ambulatory assessment becomes an integrated part of people's mobile lives.

Mixed emotions in the predictive brain

“…When emotional events are related to a single situation via shifts in attention (i.e., construal), the result may be reported as an episode of mixed emotions. To account for shifting perspectives, future research could complement emerging methods in ambulatory assessment [e.g., 60*] with classic methods for thick description of emotional episodes [e.g., structured diary entries; 61]. …”

Analyzing cyclic patterns in psychological data: A tutorial

“…Intensive longitudinal data are becoming more widely used in psychological research (Conner & Mehl, 2015). Modern technology, e. g., applications for tablets and smartphones, facilitates the use of the Ecological Momentary Assessment or Experience Sampling Method (further addressed as EMA) for obtaining data from respondents on a daily basis.…”

The Dynamic Relations Among Peritraumatic Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms: An Experience Sampling Study During Wartime

“…Indeed, processes of suppression (Küpper, Benoit, Dalgleish, & Anderson, 2014), avoidance (Wittekind et al, 2015), and changes in attention and memory processes (Dekel, Solomon, & Ein-Dor, 2016) have certainly biased responses. Furthermore, the variance in threat that can occur between different peritraumatic subperiods (i.e., periods of partial ceasefire, reduced fighting, or fighting in different regions; see Gelkopf et al, 2017) requires a real-time multiple assessment data collection method, such as intensive longitudinal assessments (i.e., experiential sampling methodology; Conner & Mehl, 2015;Myin-Germeys et al, 2009) or proximal intensive assessments (Carlson et al, 2016), to capture its dynamics. Experiential sampling methodology enables the investigation of changes over small time intervals, allows for the exploration of real-time within-subject processes and dynamics, and minimizes retrospective and ecological biases (Trull & Ebner-Priemer, 2013).…”