Designing tools for Experience Sampling and Ambulatory Assessments

June 21, 2022

Nikolaos Batalas defended his thesis at the department of Industrial Design on June 21st, 2022.

Photo: Shutterstock - Zatria.Creative

For his PhD research about implementing Experience Sampling (ESM) and Ambulatory Assessment (AA) methods on computers, with a special interest in mobile devices, Nikolaos Batalas designed and optimized programming tools for psychology researchers. Research methods such as ESM and AA are important tools in the social sciences and particularly in psychology. They help researchers to capture how people function within the context of their daily life because they reduce biases that are introduced when people are asked to recall past experiences and events from memory.

ESM and AA methods allow scientists to capture psychological phenomena as they dynamically fluctuate over time, and to explore relations between environmental influences and human responses that may be hard to observe in laboratory settings. A tool for ESM studies, called TEMPEST, was developed, aiming to satisfy key requirements such as combating the tendency of academic tools to become quickly obsolete. Tempest had to ensure the independence between different subsystems, easily extending the system and limiting its dependency upon inevitable changes of the underlying operating system.

Real world studies

The tool was used in real-world studies. Its use uncovered opportunities to improve upon aspects of the tool, such as the tree data structure that initially represented the research protocol. In response, Batalas and team introduced the representation and construction of the ESM protocol as a computer program, through specific conceptual constructs of screens, sequences and conditions. The applicability of the approach was tested in further research studies. They uncovered requirements relating to the ESM protocols that can be represented, understood and inspected by others than their creators. They can also be shared independently of the software used to construct them; a topic that has been relatively under-explored but is crucial to the replication and evaluation of scientific research.

User defined HTML elements

With the learnings from TEMPEST, a new software project was initiated, using a technology relatively recently standardized by the W3C, called Custom Web Components, which lets users define their own HTML element. This allowed Batalas to specify study protocols using custom HTML elements that allow the definition of response items, and of sequentially and conditionally executable logic for their presentation in HTML, and which can run in any web browser environment alongside any other HMTL/script content.

Thus, the ESM/AA software is now distributable as a library on the internet. This allows users to write high-level source code that implements the protocol in semantic terms used by researchers. Thus describing response items familiar to the researcher’s discipline, instead of the technical syntactic terms specific to the technicalities of the platforms. At the same time, this high-level source code remains unambiguously executable by the web browser.

This approach places social scientists who carry out ESM/AA studies in the role of a programmer, following a paradigm known as end-user development. Reflecting on this experience, Batalas revisits this paradigm and the dichotomy between end-user vs professional developer that is persistently employed within, and contribute to a long-standing discussion regarding the nature of end-user programming and development.