Human behaviour is traditionally measured using questionnaires asking patients or participants to report their feelings and experiences at specific moments in time. These questionnaires often ask about how people feel in general or over the past weeks or months. However, certain feelings and experiences might be hard to summarize or privy to biases. For example, if I heard that I passed my driver’s license exam today and you ask me what my mood was like the past two weeks, I will likely tend to overestimate my feelings of happiness given my exam results, despite having a lot of anxiety and stress building up to the exam. For this reason, more and more researchers in Psychology are using a measurement method known as ecological momentary assessment (EMA; also referred to as experience sampling method or ambulatory assessments)
What is EMA?
EMA is a method of measuring behaviour repeatedly that helps us capture experiences as they happen and/or in more natural spaces than laboratories such as at home or at work. They typically involve using mini-questionnaires daily or multiple times a day for a given period. For example, if we want to measure stress, we send participants or patients a mini questionnaire on their smartphone five times a day for two weeks, asking them about their current mood, symptoms of stress, or contextual factors such as their location or who they are with. EMA can be especially helpful in studying experiences around substance use such as smoking cigarettes. Cigarette cravings, for example, are known to vary through the day, as are withdrawal symptoms. EMA can help us get a more holistic understanding of their nicotine use. Yet, EMA takes up participant’s time and may interfere with their daily lives. Thus, it can be quite burdensome and we should only use it when it has added value compared to traditional questionnaires.
Main findings
- Mood and cigarette cravings vary notably from moment to moment and EMA can help improve the measurement of such symptoms.
- Smoking youth filled out 77% of surveys on average, suggesting feasibility of EMA.
- EMA is useful to understand young people’s smoking (cessation) experiences and we urge researchers and practitioners to use EMA to measure behaviours and feelings that fluctuate with time, to get a deeper understanding of participant experiences and to support therapeutic processes.
Research methods
WHAT?
The researchers designed an EMA protocol to measure smoking, craving, mood, sleep, and difficulty concentrating in young people who smoke cigarettes. Their first aim was to test the reliability of the protocol, i.e. whether it could capture these constructs consistently. The second aim of the study was to understand how participants experienced the EMA.
WHO? Participants were 84 late adolescents (16-20 years) from the Netherlands. They smoked cigarettes at least weekly and were at least slightly motivated to quit smoking.
HOW? First, participants filled a pre-test questionnaire. They were then invited to download the smartphone app Avicenna Research. Participants filled the EMA questionnaires 5 times a day for 7 days in the app on their smartphones. The questionnaires were short and typically took less than a minute to fill. We measured positive mood, negative mood, withdrawal symptoms, and smoking. For example, participants rated from 0-100 how much they were being bothered by the urge to smoke or how relaxed they were feeling. Participants received push notifications when a survey was available and 15 minutes before it expired.
In summary
- The researchers evaluated many measurement properties of the EMA and found support for using this method to study smoking, craving, and withdrawal symptoms in smoking youth. The EMA questions showed good reliability while also being able to capture fluctuations with time.
- The EMA provides added value about time-varying experiences that we would miss out on with traditional measurements.
- Smoking youth also gave overall positive ratings to the EMA. They liked that the EMA measurements were short and that they could also monitor their smoking and feelings.
- The participants found the questions repetitive and wished that the surveys didn’t expire. Future research can consider EMA designs that adapt to participant’s responses.
- Testing EMA protocols with the target group, such as smoking youth, provides useful insights from participants’ perspectives. The insights can help adapt the EMA to suit the target group better and promote better response rates.
Reference
Kochhar, S., Scholten, H., Maciejewski, D. F., Pingel, M. A., & Luijten, M. (2025). A mixed-methods investigation of an ecological momentary assessment protocol for cigarette-smoking youth: Psychometric properties and participant experiences. Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports, 14, 100314.
This sci-fly was written by Suhaavi Kochhar, (Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University), for RAD-blog, the blog about smoking, alcohol, drugs and diet.