Experience Sampling Method
Participants
For our participants, we chose two people, whose everyday lives are spent very differently. Both of
them are very tight on their schedules and very active; they have various activities daily. We chose to
hold the survey during the weekdays because we want to know if this tool can be useful not only for
active people during the weekend but also for active people during the weekdays. Moreover, we chose
our friends to be the participants of this survey because it is easier for the participants to contact us if
there are some technical difficulties.
Sianita Natalia is a 22-years-old college student. She is a senior, majoring in Business. She has a busy
schedule everyday; she goes to school full time and works part time. She always tries to find friends who
can do something with her whenever she has a free time.
Ridy Lie is 26-years old and currently works at a software company. Every day he works from 9 AM to 6
PM. Then, he sometimes goes out with friends to work out, have dinner, and play video games or board
games at home.
Methodology
We installed and used MyExperience in our cell phone. We gave both of the cell phones to our
participants for 2 days. We set a reminder for the user to take the survey every hour from 10 AM to 10
PM. The user has the choices of being snoozed again in 5 minutes or dismisses the survey.
Questions, Results and Discussion
The questions that we asked mainly focused on the activities that the participants currently do at that
time, where they are, and whether or not they want to do something together with friends. Therefore,
we ask them if they want to know where their friends are and if they want to let their friends know
where they are so that they can be contacted.
Being a senior college student, Sianita is very busy, and her schedule is not fixed everyday; she does not
have a regular schedule other than her class. Based on the results, she can be anywhere at anytime;
even the time for her to have lunch can be irregular. The result indicates that she always wants to find
her friends and wants her friends to find her whenever she wants to have lunch and to study with her
friends who happen in the same area. She does not have much time for finding friend to have lunch with
because her schedule is too tight. Therefore, if she has this tool, it would be very handy and efficient for
her time. Moreover, she often has group meetings, and sometimes, she can have more than one group
meetings in one day. Based on the results, even if she is in a group meeting, she still answered that she
wanted to be able to see her friends and/or wanted her friends to be able to see her. When we asked
her the reason, she said that it would be much easier to find where her group members are and to be
able to estimate when they would arrive. She also mentioned that the tool would be very useful if she
wanted to move location of the meeting. Overall, she said that she would like to have this tool. She
thinks it would be very useful for her. However, she said that sometimes, she wants to study alone or to
be alone for a while, so it would be convenient if she can have a choice to be invisible to her friends.
Ridy, on the other hand, a full-time employee, has a more regular schedule than Sianita. He always goes
to work at 9 AM to 6 PM, and he always has lunch at 12 PM everyday. Therefore, he said that it does not
matter if he has the tool. His friends know his work schedule and able to find him by calling him if they
want to have lunch and vice versa. However, in the evening, he has a more irregular schedule. During
the three-day survey, in the evening he went to work out (first evening), went to hang out with his
friends (second evening), and went to a movie (third evening). In this case, he said that he would want
to have friends to go with, and he does not mind if his friends know where they are so that they can
meet up and invite each other. However, he does not want to be bothered at night after 9 PM.
Therefore, he said that the tool is useful for him only for several hours, after he works and before 9 PM
everyday during the weekdays. “I would definitely use it during the weekend when he has a lot of free
time,” he added.
The participants complained about the reminder; the one-hour reminder is too often for them.
Moreover, they could only snooze for three times, and after that, the tool would cause an error, but
everything was back to normal once they hit the “back” button. Despite of all of the problems, the tool
successfully asked all the questions and recorded all the answers.
If we are given a chance to redo the ESM survey, we would definitely add more questions, more choices
of answers, flexibility to answer each questions, choose an appropriate time frame, and most
importantly, much more appropriate reminder. Moreover, we would do the survey to people with more
diverse background and do it in the longer time frame like a whole week, which means that we include
weekdays and weekend. Finally, we would program the survey in a more sophisticated way if we are
given a much more complete documentation for MyExperience tool.