Technology-assisted reconstruction: a new alternative to the experience sampling method

ABSTRACT

Despite the recent increase in interest in the experience sampling method (ESM), researchers have repeatedly criticised the high burden and levels of interruption that it imposes on participants, and alternative cost-effective methods, such as the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), have been adopted by the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. In this paper, we review the use of ESM and DRM in the HCI field and argue for a new paradigm called Technology-Assisted Reconstruction (TAR), according to which passively logged data of users’ behaviours are used in assisting the later reconstruction of experiences and behaviours. We discuss five methods of Technology-Assisted Reconstruction that we have developed in our past work and conclude with a framework that highlights three directions for Technology-Assisted Reconstruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Experience sampling
• day reconstruction
• ecological momentary assessment
• ambulatory assessment
• in-situ measurement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 While the terms Experience Sampling, Ambulatory Assessment and Ecological Momentary Assessment refer to different traditions and some argue that ESM is only limited to the measurement of subjective states (c.f. Stone, Shiffman, and DeVries 1999; Shiffman, Stone, and Hufford 2008), in practice these terms are nowadays used interchangeably (Scollon, Prieto, and Diener 2003; Shiffman, Stone, and Hufford 2008).