Mood and Behavior Trends Collected Using EMA: 18,000 Texts Later… Methodological Strategies and Lessons Learned

Adolescents and young people engage in texting a lot, up to 5,000 texts a month among females. Ecological momentary assessments (EMA) using texting can provide real-time, “short term” longitudinal, contextualized data about fluid variables that are particularly relevant to prevention researchers, such as patterns of mood, sleep, substance use, or social networking. Current technological capacities make real-time EMA assessments feasible and economical at large scales. Our project developed Youth Ecological Momentary Assessment System (YEMAS), a University-based software system that interfaces with a cloud-based communication company to automate sending, receiving, and tracking unique surveys multiple times a day. A pilot study was conducted to determine the feasibility and acceptability of the system; a randomized crossover design was used, assigning participants to either signal-based sampling (participants respond to a text) or signal + event-based sampling (participants respond to a text and can initiate texted data without a probe). Participants used cell phones to respond to texted surveys four times a day for two weeks, followed by a two-week break, and a second two-week texted period. Each survey consisted of up to 15 questions covering categories of mood, social network, parental monitoring, risk behaviors (substance use, violence), and protective behaviors (sleep, nutrition). Twenty-four Latina adolescent females were enrolled and completed the study, providing nearly 18,000 unique text responses.  This presentation will address numerous methodological challenges that were successfully addressed, identify the best days and times for optimal texting responses, provide example data trends and uses within and among participants, and offer important lessons learned (i.e., automated system challenges, adolescent response issues, participant burden).