An evaluation of the feasibility and outcomes of burst ESM designs
Creators: name: Schreuder, Marieke
name: Dejonckheere, Egon
name: Yuanyuan Ji
name: Ceulemans, Eva
name: Ariens, Sigert
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: The Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) has been increasingly used in affect research as it allows to capture emotions over time within a short period. Through ESM, researchers can study affect dynamics, such as how one’s emotions carry over from one moment to the next, known as inertia (Koval et al., 2021; Tammilehto et al., 2023). The majority of ESM studies have typically adopted fixed or semi-random time-contingent sampling schemes, in which participants receive questionnaires every few hours during daytime. This design has its limitations. First, it is unfeasible to regularly prompt individuals for long time periods (e.g., multiple months or years) because its associated participation burden may lead to low compliance and careless responding. Second, as affective experiences are not static and are subject to continuous changes and regulation (Waugh &amp; Kuppens, 2021), the prompts generated through time-contingent sampling schemes, which are often hours apart, may not necessarily coincide with episodes of intense affect (triggered by emotional events) in people’s lives. Moreover, the infrequency of prompts limits our ability to observe how these emotional episodes are regulated over time. Consequently, conventional ESM may miss information about how emotional episodes unfold and are regulated and may underrepresent “signals” (and may overrepresent noise; Dejonckheere &amp; Mestdagh, 2021). 
 To address the limitations of ESM studies with fixed and semi-random sampling schemes, recent studies advocated the potential of bursts (Delecroix et al., 2023; Smyth et al., 2022). Bursts are several consecutive assessments sent at short intervals (e.g., 5-10 minutes) which aim to zoom in on people’s affect during more intense emotional episodes. Because bursts are only sent when something meaningful occurs, they may better capture regulatory dynamics compared to conventional ESM designs. A key question that follows is, when should bursts be triggered? Two approaches have been adopted. The first is the signal-based design, which triggers bursts when a person reports a mood rating that can be considered extreme (relative to the distribution of mood ratings of either this specific person, or a larger sample). Here, the bursts complement an ESM design with regular, time-contingent prompts. The second approach is event-based, which lets persons decide when bursts should be triggered, for instance by instructing them to trigger bursts upon experiencing events that evoke positive or negative emotions. 
The two approaches may differ in several aspects. For example, they may impose different levels of burden on participants. On the one hand, event-based designs may lower the burden for participants, as regular prompts (except for essential reminders) are no longer needed. On the other hand, event-based designs may come with increased burden, as they implicitly require participants to continuously evaluate whether or not they should trigger a burst. Additionally, the two approaches may vary in the number of bursts triggered. The event-based design allows participants to monitor their emotions continuously, potentially capturing more emotional events, but there is a risk that participants might forget to do so, resulting in less data. In contrast, the signal-based design triggers bursts based on the predefined quantiles, but determining the quantiles for emotional episodes could be challenging, and different quantiles may lead to different numbers of triggered bursts. Regarding the valence of bursts, participants in event-based designs may under-report negative events and over-report positive events, or vice versa. It follows that both approaches may have their pros and cons. A comprehensive comparison between both approaches to trigger bursts, and their differences with conventional ESM design is, however, lacking.