Generating Feedback Reports for Ecological Momentary Assessment Data

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is a data collection method that utilizes phone apps to gather data in daily life. EMA has many advantages, such as ecological validity. However, data collection protocols are often intense, with multiple measurements per day, which can interrupt participants’ everyday activities and place a burden on them. This can reduce compliance. One way to tackle this is to provide participants with personalized data reports as an intrinsic reward. However, current frameworks to generate such reports are focused on single individuals in treatment, and not suitable for large-scale studies. Here we introduce a software to fill this gap, FRED (Feedback Reports on EMA Data), and showcase FRED by generating reports for 428 participants who took part in the WARN-D study. Participants were followed for 85 consecutive days, and received four daily and one weekly survey, resulting in up to 352 observations. We provided feedback to participants in the form of...Show moreEcological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is a data collection method that utilizes phone apps to gather data in daily life. EMA has many advantages, such as ecological validity. However, data collection protocols are often intense, with multiple measurements per day, which can interrupt participants’ everyday activities and place a burden on them. This can reduce compliance. One way to tackle this is to provide participants with personalized data reports as an intrinsic reward. However, current frameworks to generate such reports are focused on single individuals in treatment, and not suitable for large-scale studies. Here we introduce a software to fill this gap, FRED (Feedback Reports on EMA Data), and showcase FRED by generating reports for 428 participants who took part in the WARN-D study. Participants were followed for 85 consecutive days, and received four daily and one weekly survey, resulting in up to 352 observations. We provided feedback to participants in the form of downloadable HTML-files, which were generated using the R programing environment. Reports included descriptive statistics, timeseries visualizations, and network analyses on selected variables. Furthermore, we assessed participants’ perceptions of the created reports (n=54), who judged reports mostly as understandable, insightful, and that reports resonated well with them. Given that FRED is flexible and can be adjusted to the needs of a particular research project, it provides a good basis to generate large numbers of personalized data reports.Show less

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Generating Feedback Reports for Ecological Momentary Assessment Data