Understanding EMA Data: A Tutorial on Exploring Item Performance in Ecological Momentary Assessment Data

Abstract

The use of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data to study individuals in their everyday lives is popular in many areas of social and life sciences. At the same time, EMA data sets are complex, the psychometric properties of EMA items are often not investigated systematically, and scales are often neither standardized nor validated beyond their face validity. Here, we present different descriptive statistics and data visualization techniques to increase the understanding of the performance of EMA items. We apply these techniques to a wide range of items used in a large EMA dataset (599 participants, ~360 timepoints) collected in the WARN-D study to investigate their distributions, contextual influences, change over time, sources of variability, and relationship with classical static measures of psychopathology. We discuss the theoretical and substantive implications of our findings and provide researchers with R code that they can adapt to their own EMA data, as well as literature recommendations for each topic. We hope to inspire more researchers to share in-depth descriptive summaries of their experience sampling data, such that the field can move forward in understanding the performance of EMA measures across contexts.

Authors 7

1. Björn Sebastian Siepe corresponding

   Philipps University of Marburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Psychology , University of Marburg , Germany

   Department of Psychology, University of Marburg, Germany

2. Carlotta Rieble Aachen Department of Clinical Psychology

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Clinical Psychology , Leiden University , Netherlands

   Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University, Netherlands

3. Rayyan Tutunji Aachen Department of Clinical Psychology

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Clinical Psychology , Leiden University , Netherlands

   Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University, Netherlands

4. Aljoscha Rimpler

   University of Groningen

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Psychometrics and Statistics , University of Groningen , Netherlands

   Department of Psychometrics and Statistics, University of Groningen, Netherlands

5. Julius März

   Erasmus MC

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Child and Adolescence Psychiatry , Erasmus Medical Centre , Rotterdam , Netherlands

   Department of Child and Adolescence Psychiatry, Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, Netherlands

6. Ricarda K. K. Proppert Aachen Department of Clinical Psychology

   Leiden University · Philipps University of Marburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Clinical Psychology , Leiden University , Netherlands

   Psychological Methods Lab , Department of Psychology , University of Marburg , Gutenbergstraße 18 , 35037 Marburg , Germany

   Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University, Netherlands

7. Eiko I. Fried Aachen Department of Clinical Psychology

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Clinical Psychology , Leiden University , Netherlands

   Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University, Netherlands