When: Friday, December 7, 10.00-12.00
This event is open for external attendees: To register, please send an email with your name and affiliation.

Recent trends in mobile methods: Blending the experience sampling method (ESM) with mobile sensing data collection

The use of experience sampling method (ESM) is now firmly established in the social sciences. Increasingly, however, researchers across disciplines have started to design studies that directly combine ESM with mobile sensing, thereby blending the benefits of subjective self-report with more objective traces of human behavior. Drawing on recent experiences with my mobile research team, this workshop will discuss the opportunities and challenges of utilizing these evolving methods together. In particular, the workshop will consider the prospects and problems of using context-triggers – i.e., predetermined events or rules based on contextual information that initiate ESM survey notifications via mobile sensing. Communication researchers can now set context-triggers for a diverse collection of media, applications, or activities. Nonetheless, ESM studies using context-triggers come with their own set of challenges, as well as potential threats to causal inference. Altogether, this workshop reflects on some lessons learned in adapting context-triggered ESM methodology for theoretically-driven social science.

About dr. Joseph Bayer

Dr. Joseph Bayer is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, USA. His research seeks to explain the role of social cognition underlying modern connectedness. To pursue this goal, his work centers on (1) mobile social media and (2) personal network cognition, taking a mixed methods approach that pairs classic and computational social science methods. By considering how people mentally represent platforms and friendships in parallel, his agenda aims to clarify how social cognition is changing due to emergent communication technologies. His work has been published in Communication Theory, New Media & Society, Human Communication Research, and Information, Communication & Society, among other outlets.