Capturing Situational Information with Smartphones and Mobile Sensing Methods

Harari, Gabriella M.; Gosling, Samuel D.; Wang, Rui; Campbell, Andrew T.

doi:10.1002/per.2032

Cited by 44 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(21 reference statements)

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“…Analyzing individuals' behavior on smartphones has immense potential for several research areas and also for clinical practice, given that, for example, digital phenotyping has been considered a key future research area in the field of understanding excessive and uncontrolled or problematic usage of the Internet [40,41]. Please note that other similar platforms have been designed, e.g., to foster responsible gaming [42] and/or use mobile sensing in the social sciences [43,44]. We also want to point to the interesting AWARE framework (http://www.awareframework.com) and the Beiwe framework (https://www.beiwe.org/).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concept, Possibilities and Pilot-Testing of a New Smartphone Application for the Social and Life Sciences to Study Human Behavior Including Validation Data from Personality Psychology

Montag¹,

Baumeister²,

Kannen

et al. 2019

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With the advent of the World Wide Web, the smartphone and the Internet of Things, not only society but also the sciences are rapidly changing. In particular, the social sciences can profit from these digital developments, because now scientists have the power to study real-life human behavior via smartphones and other devices connected to the Internet of Things on a large-scale level. Although this sounds easy, scientists often face the problem that no practicable solution exists to participate in such a new scientific movement, due to a lack of an interdisciplinary network. If so, the development time of a new product, such as a smartphone application to get insights into human behavior takes an enormous amount of time and resources. Given this problem, the present work presents an easy way to use a smartphone application, which can be applied by social scientists to study a large range of scientific questions. The application provides measurements of variables via tracking smartphone–use patterns, such as call behavior, application use (e.g., social media), GPS and many others. In addition, the presented Android-based smartphone application, called Insights, can also be used to administer self-report questionnaires for conducting experience sampling and to search for co-variations between smartphone usage/smartphone data and self-report data. Of importance, the present work gives a detailed overview on how to conduct a study using an application such as Insights, starting from designing the study, installing the application to analyzing the data. In the present work, server requirements and privacy issues are also discussed. Furthermore, first validation data from personality psychology are presented. Such validation data are important in establishing trust in the applied technology to track behavior. In sum, the aim of the present work is (i) to provide interested scientists a short overview on how to conduct a study with smartphone app tracking technology, (ii) to present the features of the designed smartphone application and (iii) to demonstrate its validity with a proof of concept study, hence correlating smartphone usage with personality measures.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concept, Possibilities and Pilot-Testing of a New Smartphone Application for the Social and Life Sciences to Study Human Behavior Including Validation Data from Personality Psychology

Montag¹,

Baumeister²,

Kannen

et al. 2019

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“…Daily activities include people’s physical activity (via accelerometer; Miluzzo et al, 2008), sleeping patterns (via combination of light sensor and phone usage logs; Chen et al, 2013), and partying and studying habits (via combinations of GPS, microphone, and accelerometer; Wang, Harari, Hao, Zhou, & Campbell, 2015). Mobility patterns include people’s duration of time spent in various places (like their home, gym, or local café), the frequency of visiting various places, the distance travelled in a given time period, and routines in mobility patterns (via GPS and WiFi scans; Farrahi & Gatica-Perez, 2008; Harari, Gosling, Wang, & Campbell, 2015; Wang et al, 2014). …”

Section: The Promise Of Smartphone Sensingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This technique allows researchers to infer finely specified behaviors, including (among other things): talking with others in different locations (e.g., home, campus, or work), degree of physical activity in different locations, and amount of time spent alone or with groups of people in different locations. The integration of location data in this manner paves the way for more fine-grained studies of behavior expression across situations (Harari et al, 2015). …”

Section: Practical Considerations For Making Key Design Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The promise of smartphone sensing for psychologists is the possibility of converting basic sensor data (e.g., accelerometer, microphone, and GPS readings) into broader psychologically interesting variables (e.g., physical activity, sociability, and situational information; Harari et al, 2015). Psychologists are particularly well equipped to play a major role in developing such behavioral measures.…”

Section: Challenges For Smartphone Sensing In Psychological Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Using Smartphones to Collect Behavioral Data in Psychological Science

Harari

Lane

Wang

et al. 2016

Perspect Psychol Sci

Self Cite

448

335

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Smartphones now offer the promise of collecting behavioral data unobtrusively, in situ, as it unfolds in the course of daily life. Data can be collected from the onboard sensors and other phone logs embedded in today’s off-the-shelf smartphone devices. These data permit fine-grained, continuous collection of people’s social interactions (e.g., speaking rates in conversation, size of social groups, calls, and text messages), daily activities (e.g., physical activity and sleep), and mobility patterns (e.g., frequency and duration of time spent at various locations). In this article, we have drawn on the lessons from the first wave of smartphone-sensing research to highlight areas of opportunity for psychological research, present practical considerations for designing smartphone studies, and discuss the ongoing methodological and ethical challenges associated with research in this domain. It is our hope that these practical guidelines will facilitate the use of smartphones as a behavioral observation tool in psychological science.

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“…Recorder (Mehl, Pennebaker, Crow, Dabbs, & Price, 2001) for audio assessment and smartphone sensors for detecting environmental data and digital footprints (Harari, Gosling, Wang, & Campbell, 2015) stand to transform our understanding of situations. Indeed, we are excited about how advances in technology will help researchers better study persons and situations over time.…”

Section: Conclusion Future Directions and Closing Thoughtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Person-Situation Transactions across the Lifespan

Corker

Donnellan

2017

The Oxford Handbook of Psychological Situations

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Research on situations has been reinvigorated within social and personality psychology. The chapter argues that a developmental perspective on situations can further enrich understanding of person-situation transactions and generate interesting predictions for future empirical tests. The approach is grounded in life course theory (Elder & Shanahan, 2006), an interactionist approach that considers person-situation dynamics as critical to understanding individual lives. The chapter describes an overarching perspective and reviews principles of personality development before turning to an explicit consideration of how situational characteristics (the Situational Eight DIAMONDS; Rauthmann et al., 2014) may change with age. It then outlines how a developmental tasks perspective and socioemotional selectivity theory can be integrated with the DIAMONDS characteristics. It concludes by describing different kinds of person-situation transactions that promote consistency and change in psychological characteristics across the lifespan and suggests a few future directions for research.

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Capturing Situational Information with Smartphones and Mobile Sensing Methods

Cited by 44 publications

References 16 publications

Concept, Possibilities and Pilot-Testing of a New Smartphone Application for the Social and Life Sciences to Study Human Behavior Including Validation Data from Personality Psychology

Concept, Possibilities and Pilot-Testing of a New Smartphone Application for the Social and Life Sciences to Study Human Behavior Including Validation Data from Personality Psychology

Using Smartphones to Collect Behavioral Data in Psychological Science

Person-Situation Transactions across the Lifespan

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