Making the Black Box Transparent: A Template and Tutorial for Registration of Studies Using Experience-Sampling Methods

Olivia J Kirtley · Ginette Lafit · Robin Achterhof · Anu Pauliina Hiekkaranta · Inez Myin‐Germeys

130 citations0/0 files storedAdvances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Mental Health Research Topics Research Data Management Practices Academic Publishing and Open Access

Abstract

A growing interest in understanding complex and dynamic psychological processes as they occur in everyday life has led to an increase in studies using Ambulatory Assessment techniques, including the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). There are, however, numerous “forking paths” and researcher degrees of freedom, even beyond those typically encountered with other research methodologies. Whilst a number of researchers working with ESM techniques are actively engaged in efforts to increase the methodological rigor and transparency of such research, currently, there is little routine implementation of open science practices in ESM research. In the current paper, we discuss the ways in which ESM research is especially vulnerable to threats to transparency, reproducibility and replicability. We propose that greater use of (pre-)registration, a cornerstone of open science, may address some of these threats to the transparency of ESM research. (Pre-)registration of ESM research is not without challenges, including model selection, accounting for potential model convergence issues and the use of pre-existing datasets. As these may prove to be significant barriers to (pre-)registration for ESM researchers, we also discuss ways of overcoming these challenges and of documenting them in a (pre-)registration. A further challenge is that current general templates do not adequately capture the unique features of ESM. Here we present a (pre-)registration template for ESM research, adapted from the original Pre-Registration Challenge (Mellor et al., 2019) and pre-registration of pre-existing data (van den Akker et al., 2020) templates, and provide examples of how to complete this.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 130 citations exist upstream.

References

2015Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science 2013Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience 2011False-Positive Psychology 2017A manifesto for reproducible science 2012Handbook of research methods for studying daily life 2018The preregistration revolution 1994Ecological Momentary Assessment (Ema) in Behavioral Medicine 2007Experience Sampling Method

Cited by

2024Best Laid Plans: A Guide to Reporting Preregistration Deviations 2022Understanding health behaviours in context: A systematic review and meta-analysis of ecological momentary assessment studies of five key health behaviours 2021A Systematic Review of Momentary Assessment Designs for Mood and Anxiety Symptoms 2022A meta-analysis on the affect regulation function of real-time self-injurious thoughts and behaviours 2021The Impact of COVID‐19 on Adolescents’ Daily Lives: The Role of Parent–Child Relationship Quality 2020

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.