Experience-Sampling Research Methods and Their Potential for Education Research

DOI: 10.3102/0013189X14566879 © 2015 AERA. http://er.aera.net MONTH XXXX 1 Experience-sampling methodologies (ESM), sometimes referred to as “ambulatory self-report” (e.g., Conner & Barrett, 2012) or “intensive-longitudinal designs” (e.g., Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013), examine individuals’ experiences and behavior in context. The essential feature of ESM is that participants’ feelings, thoughts, actions, context, and/or activities are measured repeatedly as they go about their daily lives. By allowing us to track individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they are experienced, ESM takes an expanded epistemological stance regarding what we can know and learn about individuals. In ESM studies of subjective experience, participants complete brief surveys about their immediate environment, behaviors, feelings, and/or thoughts several times a day for a period of days or weeks, resulting in dozens or even hundreds of responses per participant (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, & Whalen, 1997). ESM studies might also include more objective measures of participants’ lives and experiences through activity monitors, random sound recordings, or other assessments of their lives as they are lived. With the exception of diary studies and a small number of innovative education researchers (e.g., Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007; Schweinle, Meyer, & Turner, 2006; Schweinle, Turner, & Meyer 2008; Shernoff & Csikszentmihalyi, 2009; Strati, Shernof, & Kacker, 2012), ESM have not been widely harnessed in education research. We argue that their broader use would allow us to expand the range of questions and ideas we can explore. Our purpose in this paper is to introduce ESM approaches to a broad readership of education researchers. We begin by reviewing what these approaches can offer researchers epistemologically and then discuss examples of ESM in the extant literature to highlight what ESM can do in terms of the questions these approaches allow us to investigate. Finally, we discuss the conceptual and technical details on the use of these methods and discuss considerations in their use for those who wish to consider using ESM in their own work. The focus of ESM is examining experience in context—in situ—as people live their lives. Originally, ESM emerged from a phenomenological standpoint, and the focus of much ESM was and remains understanding individual subjective experience as it is happening. Our own work has primarily descended from this tradition, in that we have primarily relied on self-reports of subjective experience and the context in which those experiences occur (e.g., Where are you? Who are you with? What are you 566879 EDRXXX10.3102/0013189X14566879Educational Researcher research-article2015