Mastering Experience Sampling Methods (ESM) for Mental Health Research

Mental health problems and the psychosocial processes that play a role in them are dynamic, varying over minutes, hours, and days. The experience sampling method (ESM, also known as EMA) is an increasingly popular approach to collecting real-time data about participants’ behaviours, feelings, and contexts, in their everyday lives. In this three-day course, we will provide you with an overview of how to conduct high-quality ESM studies along with practical, hands-on guidance covering everything from what type of research questions you can answer with the ESM and designing good ESM items, to which software to use to collect your data, and how to analyse the multilevel data produced by the ESM.

Pre-requisites

No previous experience with the ESM is necessary. Those following the data analysis practical session on day 3 should be familiar with using R for statistical analysis and should bring a laptop with R and R Studio already installed. The course is based on the content from the Open handbook of experience sampling methodology (Myin-Germeys & Kuppens, 2022), developed by the Center for Contextual Psychiatry and the Research Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences at KU Leuven.

Location

Online or at Orygen's Parkville main site: 35 Poplar Rd, Parkville VIC 3052

About the course leaders

Professor Olivia Kirtley

Professor Olivia Kirtley is an Assistant Research Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Contextual Psychiatry (KU Leuven, Belgium), an internationally-renowned centre of expertise in ESM. Professor Kirtley is an expert in suicide research and using ESM to study suicidal thoughts and behaviours in the daily lives of adolescents and young adults. She is also an expert in open science and its implementation in ESM and clinical psychology research, including the development of the ESM registration template and leading the ESM Item Repository.

Dr Caroline Gao

Dr Caroline Gao is co‑head of the Data Science and Analytical Methods (DSAM) unit at the Centre for Youth Mental Health (CYMH), the University of Melbourne, Orygen. Dr Gao is a biostatistician, epidemiologist and machine learner. She has over 15 years of experience in statistical consulting and training, particularly in psychology and environmental epidemiology. She has strong expertise in psychometrics as well as longitudinal and time series analysis (underlying models for ESM data).