Study social life as it actually unfolds
Situations, interactions, moods, and decisions sampled many times per person — the within-person designs that a single questionnaire cannot support.
7
Scheduling modes
30
Cognitive tasks in-app
16
Participant-app languages
The measurement problem this solves
Between-person questionnaires answer a between-person question. If the claim is that people behave differently when they are stressed, or alone, or under time pressure, the evidence has to come from the same person observed across those situations — and that means many observations per participant, timed to the situation rather than to the researcher's calendar.
Experience sampling supplies those observations, but only if the sampling schedule matches the phenomenon, the items are the ones the literature actually uses, and enough participants keep answering for long enough. Those three things are what this platform is built around.
Designs you can run
Assembled in the study builder and fielded through the participant app on iOS and Android.
Situation and interaction sampling
Random-within-window prompts ask what the participant is doing and who they are with, several times a day across a sampling window you set. Place-visit detection adds an objective marker of when the situation actually changed, independent of what the participant reports.
Daily diary and longitudinal panels
Fixed-time evening diaries, interval schedules, or smart timing, which learns each participant's best response time from their own history rather than applying one window to the whole sample.
Cognitive tasks in the field
Run a flanker, go/no-go, delay-discounting, risky-choice, or n-back task inside an ESM prompt on the participant's own phone, with mobile-tuned trial counts and scoring. Momentary self-regulation and decision-making measures arrive attached to the situation that produced them.
Participant-anchored and prescreening-driven schedules
Anchor prompts to a participant's wake time, sleep time, preferred time of day, preferred days of the week, or a calendar event — drawn from prescreening — so the sampling frame adapts to each person's life rather than flattening it.
Answer-contingent branching
A survey-answer trigger fires a follow-up survey when a participant gives a particular response, so a rare but theoretically important state — a conflict, a decision, an intrusive thought — gets its own measurement occasion instead of one item in a fixed battery.
Cross-national and multi-site samples
The participant app ships in multiple interface languages, so the same protocol can be fielded across countries without a separate build for each site.
The parts reviewers ask about, built in
Design decisions that are hard to defend after the fact are easier to make before fielding.
Power planning for the design you actually built
The study builder links into the ESM Power & Design Planner with your participants, days, and prompts per day carried across. For event- and location-triggered schedules it does not invent a prompt rate, because that number is an outcome of the participant's week rather than a design choice.
Open the power planner →A burden estimate before you field it
Time per prompt, prompts per day, and total minutes across the study are estimated from the design, checked against published benchmarks, and testable against alternatives without touching the live study. It exports a written burden statement and a participant disclosure for the ethics application.
Validated items rather than improvised ones
Build surveys from a library of validated scales and question modules tagged by construct, or add cognitive tasks with mobile-tuned trial counts and scoring. Every item is browsable publicly before you sign up.
Protocol out first, data out after
Export the protocol — surveys, items, schedules, estimated burden — as a machine-readable file and a printable document to attach to a preregistration. Export the data as CSV, JSON, or SPSS, in a long format that goes straight into a multilevel model.
Start from a social science template
Each template is a complete study configuration — surveys, items, and schedules — that you can preview publicly and clone into your account.
Loneliness & Social Connection
Weekly UCLA Loneliness Scale (3-item) and daily social interaction diary. Suited to social psychology, public health, and ageing research.
2 surveys · preview free
SocialRelationship Satisfaction Diary
Daily couples diary capturing satisfaction, conflict, positive events, communication quality, intimacy, and gratitude. Suited to relationship science and dyadic research.
1 survey · preview free
Mental HealthSocial Media & Mental Health
Weekly social media use audit and FOMO scale, plus random 3-daily EMA capturing platform use, mood before/after, and usage motivation. Suited to cyberpsychology research.
2 surveys · preview free
OccupationalOccupational Burnout & Work Engagement
Weekly Maslach Burnout Inventory adapted assessment and daily UWES-adapted work engagement check. Suited to occupational and organisational psychology research.
2 surveys · preview free
Mental HealthWork-From-Home Well-being Study
Morning work intention and end-of-workday well-being review for remote and hybrid workers. Captures motivation, interruptions, work-life boundary quality, and fatigue.
2 surveys · preview free
BehavioralBehavioral Economics Experiment
Single-session economic decision-making study combining Delay Discounting and Risky Choice tasks with self-report financial literacy, risk tolerance, and impulsivity measures.
1 survey · preview free
EU-hosted and GDPR-native
Data stays on EU infrastructure. Personal identifiers, consent records, and research data are kept separate, and a DPA is available for your institution.
Security and privacy →Encryption with a key you hold
Turn on per-study public/private key encryption and responses are encrypted on the device. Without the private key your study team holds, the stored data cannot be read.
How encryption works →Free tier, academic pricing, free for theses
A permanent free tier for piloting, 30% off every paid plan with an academic email, and a full sponsored plan for Bachelor's and Master's thesis projects.
See pricing →Questions researchers ask first
- How many participants and prompts do I need?
- The study builder links straight into the ESM Power & Design Planner with your design already filled in — participants, days, and prompts per day. For time-contingent schedules it carries the planned prompt rate across. For event- and location-triggered schedules it deliberately does not invent one, because the number of prompts a participant receives is an outcome of their week rather than a design choice, and pretending otherwise is how ESM power analyses go wrong.
- Do I have to write every item myself?
- No. The item library holds validated scales and question modules tagged by construct, following established ESM item-repository conventions, and you can drag items into a survey instead of rephrasing them. You can also submit your own validated instrument for reuse.
- Can I preregister the protocol?
- Yes. A study exports as a machine-readable protocol file and a printable document covering surveys, items, schedules, and the estimated participant burden — suitable for attaching to a preregistration or an ethics submission before you collect anything.
- What does the data come out as?
- CSV, JSON, or SPSS. Exports link survey responses, events, passive streams, and engagement metrics by participant and timestamp, in a long format that goes straight into a multilevel model.
- Will participants keep responding for four weeks?
- That is the real risk in an intensive design, so the platform treats it as one. Compliance is visible per participant by day, week, and survey type; thresholds trigger email digests; and optional engagement mechanics — points, streaks, badges, progress, missions — are available for protocols long enough to need them.
Field your next study on SMAAT
Start free, keep the free tier for piloting, and pay academic rates when the study goes live. Bachelor's and Master's thesis projects are sponsored in full.