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Compliance to a cell phone-based ecological momentary assessment study: the effect of time and personality characteristics.
Journal article

Compliance to a cell phone-based ecological momentary assessment study: the effect of time and personality characteristics.

  • 2012-01-19
Published in:
  • Psychological assessment. - 2012
Adolescent
Adult
Affect
Cell Phone
Female
Humans
Longitudinal Studies
Male
Middle Aged
Monitoring, Ambulatory
Personality
Personality Inventory
Research Design
Surveys and Questionnaires
Time Factors
Young Adult
English Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is a method that is now widely used to study behavior and mood in the settings in which they naturally occur. It maximizes ecological validity and avoids the limitations of retrospective self-reports. Compliance patterns across time have not been studied. Consistent compliance patterns could lead to data not missing at random and bias the results of subsequent analyses. In order to use modern statistical approaches for handling missing data, it is important to include variables predicting missing values into the statistical analysis. Therefore, these predictors have to be known and measured. The authors collected data on 3 four-item mood scales measuring well-being, wakefulness, and nervousness on 6 occasions per day for 7 days (N = 305) and examined compliance rate across time, within day, and within week. Results show good global compliance (mean compliance: 74.9% of calls answered). Compliance varied more within day than within week. Within day, it was lower for the first call of the day between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. and higher for the call between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Within week, calls were equally answered across days of the week, but, as the study progressed, there was a slight drop in compliance with a progressive decrease that was stronger for the first 2 calls. Compliance on the person level did not depend on personality or on satisfaction with life. Practical consequences of the results for conducting ambulatory assessment studies are discussed, and some recommendations are given.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/191958
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