Managing Experience Sampling Data Collection Effectively Online

So you have carefully planned and scheduled all the surveys for your experience sampling or ecological momentary assessment study. You have also recruited participants and set them up to start your project. Now, you need to manage data collection over the next few days and weeks.

To effectively manage data collection, we need to ensure that we can track several key dimensions:

·       Did participants receive the push notification to do the survey?

·       Did participants submit the survey in the specified time window?

·       As the data collection progresses, what are each participant's ongoing submission rates (i.e., submission of surveys) and response rates (i.e., percentage of survey questions responded to)?

In addition, we will ideally want to send additional personalized push notifications to less engaged participants, as seen through low submission rates. And you probably need to do so without identifying information about the specific participant.

In the past, all of this was tracked manually and required an inordinate amount of time to manage. Because it was so challenging, some researchers only looked at this after they had completed their data collection. However, this can be very problematic because there may be issues with completion due to design or technical issues.

As leaders of experience sampling and ecological momentary assessments at Expiwell, we have streamlined this process so you can obtain all of this information in a few clicks. You can manage all of this through our “Participant Log” on our “Insights” page.

Here, you have a snapshot of all the participants via their anonymized ID. You can view their notifications, submissions, and response rates. You can then use options to message participants and/or pay them based on their response rates.

Moreover, you can drill down to see when participants responded to or missed their surveys. In other words, you can identify what is contributing to their high or low response rates. Did the survey notifications reach them? Do they tend to miss specific survey windows?

Below, we show what this looks like when you drilldown into Participant 1 scheduled surveys. You can see that this participant completed the demographic survey, half of the scheduled morning surveys, but did not complete the afternoon survey.

As you conduct your experience sampling or ecological momentary assessment projects, use our participant log to keep track of participant engagement!

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