Ecological Momentary Assessment

Tamlin Conner & Michele M. Tugade & Lisa Feldman Barrett

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is a method used in the health and behavioral sciences to study a range of phenomena as they happen in people's daily lives outside the laboratory setting. EMA is a valued method because it fills a unique niche. It is E cological, involving multiple, immediate reports of subjective experiences (such as well-being, pain), behaviors (smoking), and/or physiological functioning (blood pressure, cortisol levels) as they occur within people's naturalistic environments. In this way, EMA avoids some of the limitations associated with assessing complex phenomena within a typical laboratory environment, such as the lack of generalizability to real-world situations. It is also M omentary. Phenomena are recorded as they are happening at a particular moment in time, rather than later from memory. Thus, EMA avoids many of the biases that come with retrospective accounts of experiences (for a discussion of these biases, see Stone, Shiffman, & DeVries, 1999). ...

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