Experience Sampling: Promises and Pitfalls, Strengths and Weaknesses

By Christie Napa Scollon, Chu Kim-prieto, E. Diener. 2003

938 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The experience-sampling (ESM) technique is a method in which recording of feelings and activities is done on-line at the moment, either at randomly selected moments or at predetermined times. This method has the advantage of being able to not only assess people’s general feelings, but to link feelings with situations, times of day, and other circumstances. Thus, ESM provides a powerful way of moving beyond simple questions about who is “happy” and who is not, to more intricate questions about when and why people experience positive and negative feelings. Compared to retrospective reports of feelings, ESM is less influenced by memory biases. ESM also allows researchers to analyze the patterning and relationships of feelings as they unfold over time. Despite the strengths and promise of this method, there are also limitations. For example, the heavy demand placed on research participants means that the sample might be biased toward highly conscientious individuals, and repeatedly reporting one’s moods might itself influence feelings. How to analyze ESM data is discussed, including the issue of how to aggregate momentary feelings into global measures of the average subjective well-being of individuals.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b3bfcbc67ae29cb3e604fd8cc70e631ae49ef76

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Citations in the corpus

Review of the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) (2014, result): “Although experience-sampling is usually seen as the method of choice in obtaining measures of feelings in natural situations (Scollon et al. 2003), advocates for the DRM recommend the method as less burdensome and invasive to participants, yielding results similar to the ESM.”
The Happy-Productive Worker Thesis Revisited (2008, background): “As a result, these z-scores control for mean-level individual differences, and reflect variation due to differences in time/situations ( Scollon et al. 2003; Zelenski and Larsen 2000).”
A stage-based model of personal informatics systems (2010, background): “Researchers have developed many techniques to motivate people to participate in these time-intensive studies, such as improved questions and mobile devices that facilitate data input [20].”
Feeling Like an Imposter: The Effect of Perceived Classroom Competition on the Daily Psychological Experiences of First-Generation College Students (2019, background): “ESM has high ecological validity—by testing psychological constructs immediately in real-world contexts—and, thus, reduces memory biases relative to other sampling methods (Beal, 2015; Scollon, Kim-Prieto, & Diener, 2003); however, it also has drawbacks (Conner, Tennen, Fleeson, & Feldman Barrett, 2”
Travel and Subjective Well-Being: A Focus on Findings, Methods and Future Research Needs (2013, methodology): “Real-time measures, such as the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) (Csikszentmihalyi & Larsen, 1987; Scollon, Kim-Prieto, & Diener, 2003) and the Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) (Stone, Shiffman, & Devries, 1999), ask for frequent and immediate reports of respondents in their normal surroundings”
Having a creative day: understanding entrepreneurs’ daily idea generation through a recovery lens (2018, background): “We preferred short scales, since a daily study implies high effort for the participants (Scollon et al., 2003; Scott and Barnes, 2011; Uy et al., 2015).”
The experience of the flow state in live music performance (2013, methodology): “The Experience Sampling Method (ESM; or a variant thereof) has been used to measure the flow experience during activities (Scollon et al., 2003) in an effort to reduce the potential bias that can result from the retrospective recall inherent in self-report measures of emotional states (Brewer, Van…”
The Satisfaction With Life Scale and the emerging construct of life satisfaction (2008, background): “Techniques such as Experience-Sampling Methodology (Diener, 2000 ; Scollon, Kim-Prieto, & Diener, 2003 ) represent assessment methodologies that, from the hedonistic perspective, provide optimal measurement of objective happiness.”
Regulation of Positive Emotions: Emotion Regulation Strategies that Promote Resilience (2007, methodology): “In this way, ESM is important in the extensive study of emotions, health, and well being (Scollon et al., 2003; Schimmack and Diener, 2003; Tugade et al., in press; Conner et al., 2004).”
Smartphone Ownership and Interest in Mobile Applications to Monitor Symptoms of Mental Health Conditions (2014, neutral): “Smartphones, cellular phones with often large touchscreens and the ability to perform many functions of a computer including hosting operating systems able to run applications, in particular have rapidly evolved and the diverse role of of smartphone applications in health care was noted in a recent ”