NWO grant for research into smartphone-based mood measurement

How reliable are the mood assessments that people complete on their smartphones each day? Psychologists Peter de Jonge and Laura Bringmann aim to find out, with a prestigious M-grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Their project, ESMmetrics, focuses on the so-called Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), a popular research method in which participants fill out brief questionnaires via an app several times a day. The method is widely used by psychologists and behavioral scientists because it offers a close-up view of daily life. But whether the collected data is actually of sufficient quality remains an open question.

De Jonge and Bringmann seek to change that. Using advanced statistical techniques, they are developing new models to better assess the quality of ESM data and to detect potential biases. The software they develop will be open source, allowing other researchers to benefit from their work as well.

The grant is part of the Open Competition, in which NWO has awarded funding to 59 innovative research projects.