DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10085104
title: Help Me study! Music Listening Habits While Studying (Dataset)

description: This repository contains the raw data used for a research study that examined university students' music listening habits while studying. There are two experiments in this research study. Experiment 1 is a retrospective survey, and Experiment 2 is a mobile experience sampling research study.
This repository contains five Microsoft Excel files with data obtained from both experiments. The files are as follows:

onlineSurvey_raw_data.xlsx
esm_raw_data.xlsx
esm_music_features_analysis.xlsx
esm_demographics.xlsx
index.xlsx
Files Description
File: onlineSurvey_raw_data.xlsx
This file contains the raw data from Experiment 1, including the (anonymised) demographic information of the sample. The sample characteristics recorded are:

studentship
area of study
country of study
type of accommodation a participant was living in
age
self-identified gender
language ability (mono- or bi-/multilingual)
(various) personality traits
(various) musicianship
(various) everyday music uses
(various) music capacity
The file also contains raw data of responses to the questions about participants' music listening habits while studying in real life. These pieces of data are:

likelihood of listening to specific (rated across 23) music genres while studying and during everyday listening.
likelihood of listening to music with specific acoustic features (e.g., with/without lyrics, loud/soft, fast/slow) music genres while studying and during everyday listening.
general likelihood of listening to music while studying in real life.
(verbatim) responses to participants' written responses to the open-ended questions about their real-life music listening habits while studying.
File: esm_raw_data.xlsx
This file contains the raw data from Experiment 2, including the following variables:

information of the music tracks (track name, artist name, and if available, Spotify ID of those tracks) each participant was listening to during each music episode (both while studying and during everyday-listening)
level of arousal at the onset of music playing and the end of the 30-minute study period
level of valence at the onset of music playing and the end of the 30-minute study period
specific mood at the onset of music playing and the end of the 30-minute study period
whether participants were studying
their location at that moment
(if studying) whether they were studying alone
(if studying) the types of study tasks
(if studying) the perceived level of difficulty of the study task
whether participants were planning to listen to music while studying
(various) reasons for music listening
(various) perceived positive and negative impacts of studying with music
Each row represents the data for a single participant. Rows with a record of a participant ID but no associated data indicate that the participant did not respond to the questionnaire (i.e., missing data).
File: esm_music_features_analysis.xlsx
This file presents the music features of each recorded music track during both the study-episodes and the everyday-episodes (retrieved from Spotify's "Get Track's Audio Features" API). These features are:

energy level
loudness
valence
tempo
mode
The contextual details of the moments each track was being played are also presented here, which include:

whether the participant was studying
their location (e.g., at home, cafe, university)
whether they were studying alone
the type of study tasks they were engaging with (e.g., reading, writing)
the perceived difficulty level of the task
File: esm_demographics.xlsx
This file contains the demographics of the sample in Experiment 2 (N = 10), which are the same as in Experiment 1 (see above).
Each row represents the data for a single participant. Rows with a record of a participant ID but no associated demographic data indicate that the participant did not respond to the questionnaire (i.e., missing data). 
File: index.xlsx
Finally, this file contains all the abbreviations used in each document as well as their explanations.