Question Modules

Items that detect inattentive or careless responding. Insert one or two into a longer battery — not more, and not in every beep of an ESM protocol, where they irritate participants and become their own source of dropout.

The minimal demographic set most studies report: age, sex, gender, country and language. Age and date of birth are both included — pick whichever your ethics approval allows, you rarely want both.

Phone platform, wearable ownership, screen time and notification habits. Worth collecting in any smartphone study — notification responsiveness and platform are the two variables most likely to explain compliance differences between participants.

A standard momentary assessment battery covering mood valence, arousal, stress, social context, and current activity.

The ONS Census 2021 ethnic group classification for England and Wales: 19 response options nested within five high-level groups. Use the full detailed list where sample size allows and collapse to the five high-level groups for analysis.

Closing battery for the end of a study: overall experience, technical problems, self-reported data quality and willingness to be re-contacted. The technical-problems item is the fastest way to find out that notifications silently failed for a subset of your sample.

A fuller context battery than EMA-Core: physical location, social company, activity and its pleasantness, plus consumption and phone use since the previous beep. Designed to be subset — most protocols use three or four of these, not all ten.

Self-reported health history: general health, chronic conditions, medication, anthropometrics and smoking. Health data is special-category under GDPR Art. 9 — every item here is flagged accordingly and needs an explicit lawful basis, not consent-by-default.

Relationship status, household composition and living situation — the background variables most often used to contextualise social ESM data.

The standard European alternative to a race/ethnicity question. Most EU ethics committees discourage collecting racial or ethnic origin directly, and official European statistics instead derive migration background from country of birth of the respondent and their parents. Note that migration background can function as a proxy for ethnic origin — treat the derived variable with Art. 9 caution even though the individual items are not themselves special-category data.

The German official definition of migration background: a person has a Migrationshintergrund if they, or at least one parent, were not born with German citizenship. Items carry German translations — switch the language selector to Deutsch before inserting to get the German wording.

Measures how heavy the protocol felt and whether taking part changed what was being measured. Reactivity is the standard threat to validity in ESM and is almost never measured — these items make it reportable. Pairs with the Burden Centre's observed-compliance estimates.

US federal standard for race and ethnicity, following the 2024 revision of OMB Statistical Policy Directive No. 15. The 2024 revision replaced the old two-question format with a single combined question and added 'Middle Eastern or North African' as a distinct category — do not use the superseded 1997 wording.

Asks participants directly about the quality of their own answers. Surprisingly effective and much less irritating than attention checks — participants are largely honest when told their answer will not affect payment. Place at the end of a session.

Education, employment, occupation and income position. Education follows ISCED 2011 and occupation follows ISCO-08 major groups, so results map onto official statistics rather than ad-hoc categories. Income is asked relative to the country average to avoid currency and cost-of-living problems.

The six-item UN standard for identifying disability in surveys. Asks about functional difficulty in six core domains rather than asking respondents to self-identify as disabled, which is why it works cross-culturally.