Capturing youth experience in real time: Using EMA to measure informal social control and risk behavior in real time

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Abstract

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods are typically intensive, longitudinal designs of repeated measurements of participants thoughts, behaviors, activities, and environments collected in or near to real-time. EMA designs offer key advantages for investigating everyday mechanisms of micro-temporal processes. We discuss the EMA design for the Adolescent Health & Development in Context study, which collected up to 5 EMA surveys per day along with continuous GPS data for one week from adolescents ages 11-17 in Columbus, Ohio. We also present an informative EMA use case, studying adolescent risk behaviors in-situ, incorporating both individual level and in-the-moment contextual factors.

Author

• Bethany Boettner, Ohio State University