Building an ecological momentary assessment smartphone app for 4- to 10-year-old children: A pilot study

by Helen M. Milojevich, Daniel Stickel, Margaret M. Swingler, Xinyi Zhang, Jeffery Terrell, Margaret A. Sheridan, Xianming Tan

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) minimizes recall burden and maximizes ecological validity and has emerged as a valuable tool to characterize individual differences, assess contextual associations, and document temporal associations. However, EMA has yet to be reliably utilized in young children, in part due to concerns about responder reliability and limited compliance. The present study addressed these concerns by building a developmentally appropriate EMA smartphone app and testing the app for feasibility and usability with young children ages 4–10 (N = 20; m age = 7.7, SD = 2.0).

To pilot test the app, children completed an 11-item survey about their mood and behavior twice a day for 14 days. Parents also completed brief surveys twice a day to allow for parent-child comparisons of responses. Finally, at the end of the two weeks, parents provided user feedback on the smartphone app.

Results indicated a high response rate (nearly 90%) across child surveys and high agreement between parents and children ranging from 0.89–0.97.

Overall, findings suggest that this developmentally appropriate EMA smartphone app is a reliable and valid tool for collecting in-the-moment data from young children outside of a laboratory setting.