Capturing drinking and nightlife behaviours and their social and physical context with a smartphone application – investigation of users’ experience and reactivity

Abstract

Background: Many addictive behaviours are influenced by the context in which they occur, but methods for simultaneously capturing the characteristics of a behaviour and its context are scarce. This study describes a smartphone application developed to document young adults’ nightlife and drinking behaviours and investigates its impact on participants’ lives.

Methods: 241 participants, aged 16–25 (46.5% women), were asked to document 10 Friday and Saturday nights over seven weekends. Using their own smartphones, they documented the beverages consumed and the social and physical context by means of questionnaires, photos, and video clips, while phone sensors (e.g., GPS, Bluetooth, accelerometer) were running in the background. Quantitative and additional qualitative data (40 in-depth interviews) were used to investigate response burden, assessment reactivity, and disruption of usual activities among three participant groups, arranged according to the number of reports submitted during the study.

Results: 69% of participants documented 10 or more nights. Compared with the most frequent contributors, regular and irregular participants reported similar numbers of non-alcoholic drinks per night, but lower numbers of alcoholic drinks. Within each group, the number of drinks consumed did not change over the course of the study. Taking pictures and video clips was sometimes perceived as inappropriate and potentially disruptive to the ongoing social activities.

Conclusion: The application required a high but sustainable degree of commitment and did not induce reactivity. The method might be adapted to study other context-dependent addictive behaviours. Measures to decrease response burden and disruption of usual activities are proposed.

Keywords:

• Ecological momentary assessment (EMA)
• smartphone application
• drinking behaviours
• assessment reactivity
• response burden
• long-tail data distribution

Disclosure statement

The authors do not have any conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (projects “Youth@Night” [grant CR1I1_120181/1] and “Dusk2Dawn” [grant CRSII5_173696]) and approved by the Lausanne and Zurich cantonal ethics committees for research on human beings (protocol 145/14).

Notes on contributors

Florian Labhart

Florian Labhart is a PhD student at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and a research associate at the Research Institute of Addiction Switzerland in Lausanne and the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland. His research mainly focuses on the social and environmental determinants of risky alcohol use among young people and on the development of smartphone-based event-level data collection methods.

Flavio Tarsetti

Flavio Tarsetti is a Senior Research and Development Engineer at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland. He contributes actively to the development of a wide number of industrial and research projects related to Idiap's topics of interest.

Olivier Bornet

Olivier Bornet is the Head of Research and Development Team at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland. He manages the activity of a team of research and development engineers and is very active in a large number of industrial and research projects related to Idiap's topics of interest.

Darshan Santani

Darshan Santani received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from EPFL and the Social Computing Group at Idiap Research Institute in 2016. His research interests lie at the intersection of mobile, social and urban computing.

Jasmine Truong

Jasmine Truong is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research interests include geographies of youth, digital geographies, multi-media methods, and feminist theories.

Sara Landolt

Sara Landolt is a research group leader and lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research interests include geographies of youth, urban nightlife including drinking cultures of youth, as well as feminist methodology and knowledge production.

Daniel Gatica-Perez

Daniel Gatica-Perez directs the Social Computing Group at Idiap and EPFL in Switzerland, affiliated with the School of Engineering and the College of Humanities. His research integrates theories and methods from ubiquitous computing, social media, machine learning, and social sciences to understand human and social behaviour in everyday life for social good applications. His current work includes mobile crowdsensing in cities and large-scale analysis of mobile social media, smartphone data, and open data.

Emmanuel Kuntsche

Emmanuel Kuntsche is a Professor of Public Health and the Director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at the LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia and an Associated Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His areas of expertise concern alcohol-related cognitions in children and adolescents and event-level assessment and analysis of alcohol use behaviours and determinants.