Analyzing GPS Data for Psychological Research: A Tutorial

Abstract

The ubiquity of location data-enabled devices provides novel avenues for psychology researchers to incorporate spatial analytics into their studies. Spatial analytics use GPS data to assess and understand mobility behavior (e.g., locations visited, movement patterns). This tutorial provides a practical guide to analyzing GPS data in R, introducing researchers to key procedures and resources for conducting spatial analytics. We show readers how to clean GPS data, compute mobility features (e.g., time spent at home, number of unique places visited), and visualize locations and movement patterns. In addition, we discuss the challenges of ensuring participant privacy and interpreting the psychological implications of mobility behaviors. The tutorial is accompanied by an R Markdown script and a simulated GPS dataset made available on the Open Science Framework.

Cite this work

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

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

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