A window onto the psychology of everyday life : assessing students’ daily behaviors using smartphone sensing methods

The purpose of my dissertation is to assess the viability of using smartphone-sensing methods for behavioral data collection in psychological research, and reveal the patterns of social behavior that characterize students’ everyday lives. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of smartphone sensing methods and discuss the current opportunities for their use in psychological research. In Chapter 2, I describe the two datasets that are used in this dissertation. In Chapter 3, I examine the viability of using smartphone sensing methods for psychological research by assessing participants’ motivations to self-track, their participation preferences, and their compliance rates in using a smartphone sensing application. The results show that students were interested in using self-tracking tools, and were motivated to self-track to maintain productive lifestyles, monitor their well-being, and increase their social life on campus. The results also suggest that students’ compliance in using a self-tracking app was highest when incentives matched students’ motivations to participate. In Chapter 4, I examine the psychometric properties of smartphone-based social behaviors in the context of students’ affiliation behaviors (i.e., ambient conversation, conversation frequency, co-presence with others) and interaction behaviors (i.e., incoming and outgoing calls and text messages, unique and repeated contacts) over time. The results provide estimates of the base rates, interindividual variability, and temporal stability of students’ social behaviors across different time frames (i.e., daily, weekly, times of the day, days of the week). In Chapter 5, I discuss practical considerations for researchers interested in using smartphone sensing for behavioral data collection, and discuss current challenges of the method. Taken together, the results from these studies provide important insights into the behaviors that make up everyday student life and establish the viability of using sensing methods to capture behaviors in psychological research.