The quantified Self in Health
(0HM240)
Summary
Index
Handbook of research methods for studying daily life..........................................................................2
Chapter 1: Why Researchers Should Think “Real-World”: A Conceptual Rationale...........................2
Chapter 2: Why Researchers Should Think “Real-Time”: A Cognitive Rationale................................4
Chapter 3: Why Researchers Should Think “Within-Person”: A Paradigmatic Rationale...................5
Chapter 4: Conducting Research in Daily Life: A Historical Review....................................................7
Chapter 6: Measurement reactivity in Diary Research....................................................................10
Chapter 12: Bridging the Gap between the Laboratory and the Real World: Integrative Ambulatory
Psychophysiology.............................................................................................................................12
Chapter 13: Ambulatory Assessment of Movement Behavior: Methodology, Measurement, and
Application.......................................................................................................................................14
Chapter 14: Passive Telemetric Monitoring: Novel methods for Real-World Behavioral assessment
.........................................................................................................................................................16
Chapter 15: Emerging Technology for Studying Daily Life...............................................................18
Chapter 32: Health Psychology........................................................................................................19
Chapter 35: Clinical Psychology.......................................................................................................20
The Smartphone Psychology Manifesto (Miller)..................................................................................21
The transparent Self (Lanzing).............................................................................................................23
Experience sampling: promises and pitfalls, strengths and weaknesses (Scollon, Kim-Prieto and
Diener).................................................................................................................................................25
Understanding the Human Machine (Lupton).....................................................................................27
M-Health taxonomy: A Literature Survey of Mobile Health Applications (Olla)..................................28
The Incidence of Stress Symptoms and Heart Rate Variability during Sleep and Orthostatic Test
(Hynynen et al.)...................................................................................................................................30
Ecological Momentary Interventions in Psychiatry (Myin-Germeys)...................................................31
Biohacking (Peter Joosten)..................................................................................................................32
Chapter 1.........................................................................................................................................32
Chapter 2.........................................................................................................................................33
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,Handbook of research methods for studying daily life
Chapter 1: Why Researchers Should Think “Real-World”: A Conceptual
Rationale
Methods for studying daily life, two categories:
1. Self-reports of behavior: affect and cognition collected repeatedly over a number of
days, either once daily or sampled several times during the day. These include
experience sampling method (ESM), ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and
event-contingent sampling which is triggered by particular events.
2. More technically sophisticated methods for capturing diverse, non-self-reported
aspects of everyday experience. E.g. auditory environment, psychophysiological
status, physical location and proximity to particular other persons.
Daily life protocols: intended to ‘capture life as it is lived’. It describes behavior as it occurs
within its typical, spontaneous setting. By documenting the particulars of life. They provide
extensively detailed data that can be used to examine the operation of social, psychological,
and physiological processes within their natural contexts. A key premise is that the contexts
in which these processes unfold matter, context influences behavior, and proper
understanding of behavior requires taking context into account.
Daily life measures advantages:
- Eliminate retrospection bias.
- Minimize selectivity in describing experiences.
- Allow researchers to describe behavior as it occurs in natural contexts.
- Provides a different kind of information than traditional methods: information that
provides a novel and increasingly valuable perspective on behavior.
- Can be used to study variables about which people are unlikely to have access even
when they occur (psychophysiological states), or to which people are unlikely to
attend unless directed to (ambient attributes of physical environment). For these,
retrospective surveys are not feasible.
Retrospective surveys concern reconstructed experience: they characterize circumstances
from the person's current vantage point, reflecting the various cognitive and motivational
processes that influence encoding, storage, retrieval, and assessment of episodic memories.
Daily life measures tap ongoing experience, or concurrent accounts of activity (often
obtained in or close to real time) and the person's feelings about that activity.
Brewers criteria for external validity (if an effect that has been demonstrated in one
research setting would be obtained in other settings, with different participants and
procedures).
1. Ecological validity: if a study accurately represents typical conditions under which
an effect occurs in the real world.
2. Robustness: if findings are replicated in different settings with different samples or in
different historical or cultural circumstances.
3. Relevance: if findings can be used to change behavior in the real world.
Ecological validity is not guaranteed by the use of daily life methods but it reflects the
correspondence between the conditions of a study and the conclusions that are drawn from
it.
Reasons why daily life protocols may have greater ecological validity than other protocols:
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, 1. By observing phenomena in their natural contexts, without controlling other
influences, behavioral processes can be investigated within the full complement of
circumstances in which they are most likely to occur.
2. Daily life studies can examine the nature and repercussions of events that cannot
ethically or pragmatically be studied in the laboratory (e.g. health crises or abusive
behaviors in families).
3. Well suited to track how behavioral processes unfold over time. They assess change
in real time and are sensitive to contextual factors that covary with adaptation to such
events.
4. Real-time daily life measures typically assess respondents while they are physically
located in the focal behavioral setting.
No single study can minimize all threats to internal validity while simultaneously maximizing
generalizability. Internal validity re quires careful control of context, whereas external
validity requires letting contexts vary freely. Laboratory settings are suitable for carefully
controlled studies, because manipulations can be crafted there to test specific theoretical
principles while controlling real-world "noise" and ruling out alternative explanations and
potential artifacts (e.g., those factors that covary in natural settings with the key independent
variable). Daily life studies illustrate processes in more realistic, complex settings, thereby
demonstrating the nature and degree of their impact.
Validity depends on matching protocols, designs, and methods to questions, so that across a
diverse program of studies, plausible alternative explanations are ruled out, important
boundary conditions are determined, and the real-world relevance of a theory is established.
Benefits of laboratory:
- Experimental control over variables, settings, and procedures, which allowed
researchers to control extraneous influences and thereby maximize internal validity.
- Convenience of undergraduate samples.
However, they isolate research participants from their everyday concerns and activities and
subject them to an artificial environment in which nearly all contextual factors are determined
by the experimenter.
Mundane realism: extent to which the events of an experiment resemble real-world events.
Experimental realism: extent to which an experimental scenario is involving.
Environmental psychology: studies the influence of the built and natural environment on
behavior.
Social psychology: studies how psychological properties of situations influence behaviors.
Daily life research takes context into account in one of three ways:
1. Assess behaviors in its natural context rather than in specialized environments.
2. Assess context and behavior simultaneously, so that associations can be identified.
3. New technologies allow research to ask context-sensitive questions.
Demand characteristics: cues that suggest to research participants the behavior that
researchers expect of them.
Strong situations: relatively structured, providing salient, unambiguous, and compelling
cues about appropriate behavior.
Weak situations: unstructured, offer few or no incentives, and have few or ambiguous cues
to guide behavior.
Snyder and Ickes propose that strong situations are likely to support normative theories
(most people behaving the same way), whereas weak situations are more likely to reveal
individual differences.
Dimensions of context that impact behavior:
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, 1. Nominal properties of the setting: e.g. environmental stress and space utilization.
2. Goals activated by the setting.
3. Other persons present or thought about in the setting.
Chapter 2: Why Researchers Should Think “Real-Time”: A Cognitive
Rationale
Answering a question in a research context requires that respondents:
1. Interpret the question to understand what the researcher wants to know.
2. Retrieve and select relevant information.
3. Form an answer.
4. Map it onto a set of response alternatives provided by the researcher.
5. Edit the answer before they communicate it, due to social desirability and self-
presentation.
Respondents’ use of rating scales reflects regularities:
1. Respondents use the most extreme stimuli to anchor the endpoints of the scale.
2. Respondents attempt to use all categories of the rating scale about equally often
when the number of to-be-rated stimuli is large.
Frequency questions: report on frequency of a behavior/experience during a specified
reference period. Respondents usually need to rely on extensive inference and estimation
strategies to arrive at an answer; which strategy they use depends on frequency,
importance, and regularity of the behavior.
- Rare and important behaviors: recall and count strategy
- Highly regular: rate information. Estimates are accurate only when exceptions are
rare, because they are likely to miss.
- Extrapolation from partial recall.
When people report on their current feelings, the feelings themselves are accessible to
introspection, allowing for accurate reports on the basis of experiential information. But
affective experiences are fleeting and not available to introspection once the feeling
dissipates. Accordingly, the opportunity to collect emotion reports based on introspective
access is limited to methods of real-time data capture, such as experience sampling. Once
the feeling dissipates, the affective experiences need to be reconstructed on the basis of
episodic or semantic information.
Attitudes: hypothetical constructs that cannot be directly observed and need to be inferred
from individual’s responses to the attitude object.
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