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Ecological momentary assessment in aging research: A critical review
Open accessAbstract
Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) gathers respondent data on affective, behavioral, and contextual experiences as close in time to those experiences as possible. Potential advantages of EMA in aging research include reducing memory biases and gathering intra-individual data, yet there is little understanding about implementation. The goal of this critical review was to assess the feasibility and applications of EMA in psychological and behavioral research on aging. Through a comprehensive search of the online electronic databases, Psycinfo and Pubmed, for English-language peer-reviewed journals published between 1990 and 2007, we identified 40 articles using EMA methods in older adults. Studies sampled participants between five times per day over one day to once a week for 210 days. Samples were generally not cognitively impaired, evenly split between healthy and clinical populations, and only 6 of 40 studies focused on psychiatric diagnoses. The most common assessment content solicited ratings on affect (n=15), activities of daily living (n=12), physical activities (n=10), and social exchanges (n=8). A total of 90% of the studies that reported compliance reported rates over 80%. Uses of EMA varied widely, with research goals including validation of global measures, detection of subtle treatment effects, and for testing hypotheses about causal intra-individual relationships. Although these measures appear feasible and useful in aging research, recommendations for future studies include adapting measures to enable data collection among older participants with cognitive impairments and/or psychopathology, along with greater use of electronic data capture to improve compliance and increase ease of implementation.
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“This approach has many advantages87 over “one-time, in-clinic” measures, including the generation of more stable estimates of neurobehavioural symptoms for outcomes research;88 the assessment of dynamic changes among theoretically linked constructs;89 the reduction of recall bias for patients with neurobehavioural disorders;90,91 and the ability to model causal intra-individual relationships.92”
From Precision clinical trials: a framework for getting to precision medicine for neurobehavioural disorders (2021) · cites this paper as [87]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Cain, A. E., Depp, C. A., & Jeste, D. V.
- Affiliations
- University of California San Diego (US)
- Corresponding author
- Depp, Colin A.
- Venue
- Journal of Psychiatric Research
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2009-07
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 987-996
- ISSN
- 0022-3956 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3638997
- OpenAlex
- W2124881052
- Cited by
- 164
- References
- 58
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 8 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 0.35
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Locations
- Journal of Psychiatric Research (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- National Institute of Mental Health (R34MH091260, K23MH077225, P30MH066248)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Mental Health Research Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Aging and Gerontology Research
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Aging, Health, and Disability
- Keywords
- ecological momentary assessment, aging research, older adults, memory bias, within-person variability, affect, activities of daily living, physical activity, social exchange, cognitive impairment, psychopathology, electronic data capture, treatment effect detection
- MeSH terms
- Aged, Aging, Compliance, Ecology, Humans, Research, Time Factors, Reproducibility of Results, Geriatric Assessment, Databases, Bibliographic
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