Capturing a person’s daily context
Recently, technological advances have enabled researching peoples’ experiences in daily life by sending them multiple short questionnaires per day on their smartphones. This ‘experience sampling methodology’(ESM) is increasingly used for mental health related research and clinical practice. Often, ESM questionnaires focus primarily on a person’s mood, thoughts, or feelings. Other, so-called ‘contextual’ factors, such as someone’s social interactions and relationships or what someone does during their day, also play a significant role in daily life and impact mental health. These factors have, however, received relatively little attention in ESM thus far.
The goal of this thesis is to focus on these contextual factors and introduce new methods for both research and clinical practice. Specifically, it combines ESM with personal social network data collection (PSN) – a method mapping out a person’s social relationships. The thesis outlines the importance of someone’s (social) context and explains the potential of combining ESM and PSN. Further, it presents software for the implementation of this combination and describes its use in two studies with students and one case study in clinical practice. The ESM questionnaires used in the presented research contain open-ended questions to obtain richer, more personally meaningful descriptions of daily activities. This thesis demonstrates how such data can be analyzed with natural language processing or qualitative approaches.
In sum, this thesis provides a methodological basis for researchers and practitioners to examine a person’s daily life ‘context’ – their social relationships, social interactions, and daily activities – and how it relates to symptoms or feelings.