Hello Mahbub,
Here are a few thoughts in response to your questions about the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). My experience is squarely in the Csikszentmihalyi approach. Others with more experience or from different schools might be able to provide greater detail or other suggestions.
1) SOFTWARE: Check out the (free) smartphone app "PACO" -- it is designed specifically to support experience sampling. You can technically do the week-start and/or week-end surveys on it, but those are probably best done using your favorite standard survey application (e.g. Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey). PACO is available (last time I checked) for both iOS and Android.
2) NESTING DATA: Because PACO was developed with ESM in mind, it tags the data by respondent, with time stamps, etc.
3) PRE-SELECTED TIMES: Traditional ESM randomly notifies ("pings") participants for a response, but I'm pretty sure PACO allows you to pre-select times to "ping" your participants. Technically, doing only end-of-day (or really any fixed interval) pings is transitioning to "journaling" data collection, rather ESM.
4) DEMOGRAPHICS: Ping-level surveys should not include anything that doesn't change by ping. Random pings typically need to be pretty concise. End of day surveys in the journaling style can be longer. But anything that doesn't change materially over the study (e.g., demographics, individual traits) should be done once as a pre- or post-survey. Or possibly split into a pre- and a post-survey.
5) SAMPLE SIZE: The answer depends on a number of factors, the most important probably being the effect size you're expecting. But there are also the usual problems with repeated measures (e.g., dropouts). A good place to start is to find some recently published examples and see how they determined their sample size.
I hope these simple suggestions prove helpful.
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Gregory Hennessy
Claremont Graduate University
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-09-2018 18:03
From: Mahbubul Alam
Subject: Questions about Experience Sampling Survey
Hello all,
I am a PhD candidate and in the process of preparing questionnaire for my dissertation research. One of the two studies I plan to conduct is experience sampling survey. The research is aimed at identifying managers emotion regulation strategies. I want to conduct the survey on supervisor population for 5 consecutive days. I have few questions as how to go ahead with this survey:
1. What would be good survey software to use? How about google form (free) or survey monkey? Is there any better survey software for experience sampling?
2. What is the way to make sure to sort the 5 consecutive surveys of one respondent under that particular respondent. What should I do during questionnaire preparing phase to make sure so that the NESTING of 5 different days' responses can be made under that particular respondent.
3. Can I program so that the questionnaire can be sent to the participant at the pre-selected particular time (5pm of every day)
4. Is it better to collect the demographic information with a separate survey or on the first day of the survey.
5. I am hoping to have 125 plus completed 5-day surveys. how many respondent i should target initially.
I would appreciate any other advice that you may have for me to conduct such a survey.
Thank you
Mahbub Alam
PhD Candidate
York University, Canada
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Mahbubul Alam
York University, Canada
East York ON
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