It’s About Time - Improving Intensive Longitudinal Data

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) has been increasingly used to understand dynamic phenomena in clinical psychology, but core measurement problems that threaten its validity remain unaddressed. The aim of this workshop is to address these measurement challenges to improve the validity of inferences drawn from data collected with ecological momentary assessment (EMA).

We will focus on three core validity issues that were previously identified through scientific meetings and literature search: (A) different response processes involved when participants answer questions; (B) concerns about decreases in data quality over time, for example due to lack of motivation and increasingly careless responding; and (C) the challenge that psychological phenomena such as moods and experiences likely happen across different time scales.

The concrete aims will be to (1) facilitate interdisciplinary knowledge exchange through workshops, roundtable discussions, debates, and keynote presentations; (2) address the mentioned core validity issues through concrete research projects; and (3) create a roadmap for the research community’s future work.

The core validity issues will be addressed through four research projects. Issue (A) will be tackled through the project “Response processes in EMA: Finding out how participants decide on their answers”. Issue (B) will be addressed in two projects “Gamification in EMA: Effectiveness of using personalized awards in data collection” and “Data Quality in EMA: Data quality and retention of attention over time during EMA”. The last issue (C) will be addressed via the project “Time Scales in EMA: Understanding psychological phenomena across different time-scales”.

To achieve our aims and facilitate work on the research projects, this five-day workshop will include different formats. These will include presentations and workshops, hackathons that will utilize several EMA datasets and be expected to achieve substantial gains within the mentioned research projects, as well as roundtable discussions to zoom out and facilitate the creation of a roadmap for future research.

The workshop organizers are members of an international, independent and interdisciplinary consortium ‘Measurement Is The New Black’ (MITNB) that was founded in 2022 to tackle often neglected but crucial measurement issues in EMA research. This workshop presents an opportunity for the consortium members and other experts to connect and broaden their horizons, start concrete, dedicated projects in new, multidisciplinary teams to work on the identified challenges, and create a shareable roadmap for the research community highlighting the focal points in EMA measurement research for the next decade to come.