ABSTRACT
Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) techniques can be usefully applied to help researchers understand consumers’ decisions, emotions, preferences, and attitudes in daily life. EMA techniques can often be used to complement laboratory or experimental findings by attempting to generalize the findings to real-world situations. The repeated measures feature of EMA designs allows researchers to examine between- and within-person variations. Aggregated EMA data provide more accurate estimates of the rate of occurrence of the phenomena of interest and/or average levels of continuous phenomena, whereas retrospective reports may provide more accurate estimates of future intentions of the behavior. EMA techniques can serve multiple purposes depending on the goal of the study. The authors describe four of the key uses of EMA: Characterizing individual differences, describing natural history, assessing contextual associations, and documenting temporal sequences. There are two primary types of assessment schemes in EMA designs: event-based sampling and time-based sampling.
