Tapping Into the App: Updating the Experience Sampling Method for the 21st Century

Our understanding of emerging adults is largely based on retrospective self-reports that can be limited by poor recall, current mood, and social desirability. To address these shortcomings, Larson and Csikszentmihalyi pioneered the experience sampling method (ESM) with electronic pagers and paper-pencil surveys. The increasing ubiquity of smartphone ownership allows researchers to take ESM to the next level: developing smartphone applications programmed to alert participants, collect responses, and send data directly to a database for analysis. This article suggests types of research questions relevant to emerging adults that can be pursued using ESM. We also present a case study of the development of an Android app with 68 emerging adults, including the challenges and benefits of using this technology. Despite the challenges, we encourage researchers to consider ESM as an innovative and ecologically valid method for studying within-and between-participant variability on a variety of topics relevant to emerging adults.