Study Design
5 posts tagged with “Study Design”
What a review of 162 experience-sampling studies shows about current practice
A systematic review published in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science extracted methodological detail from 162 experience-sampling studies published in a single year. The picture it produces is one of wide variation in design choices and uneven reporting, with sample-size justification and missing-data handling the weakest points. Here is what the numbers say and what they imply for a protocol being written now.
August 24, 2026
Prompt frequency, questionnaire length, and study duration: the design trade-offs that shape ESM data quality
Three upstream design choices determine how much burden an ESM participant carries and how much usable data a study produces: how many prompts arrive per day, how many items each prompt asks, and how many days the protocol runs. This post reviews what the evidence says each choice costs and buys — including the experimental finding that questionnaire length, not sampling frequency, is what degrades data quality — and covers the response window as a fourth, separate decision.
August 17, 2026
Why ESM studies need open-ended responses alongside numeric ratings
Numeric rating scales dominate experience sampling, but they cannot capture context, idiosyncratic meaning, or a participant's own account of what caused a mood shift. A 2026 position paper by Bringmann and colleagues makes a systematic case for reintegrating open-ended text responses — here is what the argument rests on, what it costs in burden, and what it requires in consent and analysis.
August 3, 2026
From experience sampling to just-in-time adaptive interventions: what the protocol has to specify
A just-in-time adaptive intervention asks four things of a study design that a standard experience-sampling protocol never has to answer: when the adaptive logic runs, what data informs each decision, what rule turns that data into action, and how receptivity is measured. This post works through each requirement, defines the terms, and sets out what each one demands of the SMAAT platform underneath.
May 18, 2026
What the latest ESM methodology review says, and what it means for study design
A 2026 review in the British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology summarises recent developments in experience sampling methodology across three levels: design, statistical analysis, and implementation. This post goes through each level and states what it implies for a protocol that is still being written.
May 11, 2026