In order to study subjective experience, psychologists rely on self-report data. Most of these measures, however, are collected retrospectively and may suffer from recall biases. Researchers have long been aware of the fact that people are unreliable and often unable to provide accurate retrospective information about their daily behaviour and experience (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1983). For example, how you remember feeling yesterday after lunch might be quite different from how you actually felt at that moment. This is because thinking about a particular experience retrospectively outside of the context of the situation allows distortions and rationalizations to play a role in how we reconstruct a particular experience. Thus, data collected retrospectively will suffer from the same shortcomings. In the 1970’s, psychologists realized that a more ecologically valid method of studying subjective experience would be to collect such data at the exact moment an event takes place. Researchers took advantage of the emerging “beeper” technologies of the time for use in this type of research. Signalling devices were carried by participants who were instructed to make notes of their current subjective experience upon the triggering of the device’s alarm at random points in time. This research methodology became known as the Experience-Sampling Method (ESM). The general purpose of this technique is to study the subjective experience of people as they interact in their natural environment, in a way to ensures ecological validity. The goal of this work is to identify and analyze how patterns in people’s subjective experience relate to wider conditions of their lives such as mental health and well-being (Hektner et al., 2006).
Since the 1980’s this methodology has been modified and improved as allowed by the available technology. For example, in the 1990’s as PDA’s became available researchers developed compatible ESM software. In the early 2000’s, as smartphones began to emerge, researchers developed software compatible with Windows Mobile. Surprisingly, however, despite the explosion in smartphone use and development, no significant updates have been made to this methodology, and to date there are no dedicated applications available for either Android or iPhone. The current project takes advantage of some of the technologies available in today’s devices and makes significant improvements over previous experience sampling methods. Our goal was to develop an application that would be ready for use by psychology researchers to study subjective experience.