We used EMA in different studies to measure the correlation between physical activity and mood (among other parameters). We used the tool "movisens XS" (https://xs.movisens.com/) wich is a web based platform to create forms for android smartphones.

Hi Dr. Stefan,

Many thanks for your response and great guidance.

Have you shorted/cut your scales (in items) by smartphones or not? or you used the normal scales?

Is the website that you mentioned applicable for other languages? or is just for English.

Regards

We used a short form of a questionnaire designed for EMA. The webside to design the forms is only in english, but you can create Forms in any language.

Stefan,

Thank you for your guidance. Your short forms of questionnaire were valid or you had done their validity and reliability? or this is the specific of EMA?

Best regards,

To assess mood states frequently in everyday life, the short-scale developed by Wilhelm and Schoebi (2007) to measure the three basic mood dimensions valence, calmness and energetic arousal, was used. The scale incorporates only two items per mood -dimension. The participants had to respond to the statement “At the moment I feel...” by providing information relating to six bipolar items, which were each graded on a seven-step scale (0 to 6) with the contrary adjectives as endpoints. Energetic arousal was assessed by the items tired-awake and full of energy-without energy; calmness by agitated-calm and relaxed-tense and valence by content-discontent and unwell-well.

Each dimension was, therefore, ascribed both a negatively and positively polled item. In order to obtain rectified scale values for each dimension, the items relating to the negative mood pole ("content-discontent", "full of energy- without energy" and "relaxed-tense") were recorded. Thus low values indicated low calmness, valence and energetic arousal and higher values indicated a higher level of the three mood dimensions. The mean value per dimension was used for statistical analysis (Wilhelm, P. & Schoebi, D. (2007). Assessing Mood in Daily Life. Structural Validity, Sensitivity to Change, and Realiability of a Short-Scale to Measure Three Basic Dimensions of Mood. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 23 (4), 258 - 267.)

Dear Stefan, Many thanks for your explanation.

Kind regards,

We are using an "short message service" 8SMS-track) platform to get weekly answers on activities from the past week. We have now been using it for 6 years i a cohort of 1200 school children and have a very good response rate. You might want to look at the web-page sms-track.com, to see if it a tool that you could use.

Best wishes

Niels Wedderkopp

Niels,

Thank you for your response. To measure a validity or reliability for short message, and how you use scales, in a short forms or in which way?

Normally, for measuring some scales that there are just some special words in scale, we can use by message, but for longer questions in scale, how we can use them? by SMS.

Best regards,

We have used ESM for studying activities in free time, using Experience sampling program developed by Feldman Barrett and Barrett, on palm devices (not on mobile phones, I don't know if there is a version that can be used on smartphones). Program is very easy to use, and questions can be in any language you want.

We have also measured mood, using short PANAS scale and motivation for activities using adaptation of Orientations to happiness scale (Peterson, Park and Seligman), because we were interested in hedonic and eudaimonic aspects / motives for activities.

However, I think there could be a problem in the response rate - it could be much lower during exercise (or playing an instrument, rehearsing for school play...). Those are intense activities, that need a lot of attention, effort and concentration and people are not keen to answer to your signals during those activities. Probably this could be solved by using event contingent method (where they give their ratings every time after such activity, so there are no interruptions), and not signal contingent method (where they need to respond right after the signal). Of course, event contingent method is more prone to bias tied with retrospective answering, while the signal contingent method will burden the participants more. You just need to weight pros and cons.

Behzad

The Short Message Service question (SMS-track) we use are very short, with a positive response, e.g. asking if a child has pain, a yes then results in a telephone interview to find out what is wrong, in our study a yes to pain also resulted in a clinical examination.

Our use of the SMS-track was not an every day thing, but a weekly short questionnaire. We have published the protocol and there are already several publications on the use of the SMS-track. You can find the primary reference here

Wedderkopp N, Jespersen E, Franz C, Klakk H, Heidemann M, Christiansen C,

Møller NC, Leboeuf-Yde C. Study protocol. The Childhood Health, Activity, and

Motor Performance School Study Denmark (The CHAMPS-study DK). BMC Pediatr. 2012, Aug 20;12:128.

It is open access.

Best wishes

Niels

Hi Petra, thank you for your response.

I was wondering if you could give me more info about palm device and how to use among subjects.

Research in Hedonic and Eudaimonic are interesting concepts and they are my research focus too.

Dear Neils, thank you for your response.

I have studied you study and congratulation for your great study.

I was wondering if you could explain the range of your questions in questionnaires, is that ^yes or no^ questions or different?

and what about the length of your questions.

I wonder if you could give me more info about your studies by using SMS-Track.

Thank you in advance

Hi Alexis, thank you so much for your advice. I want to use it, but I dont know in which way I should use it in ecological momentary assessment! ( in smartphones or websites) or how can I short this scale in smartphones, .. !

Dear Bezhad

It is one question concerning pain during the last week and the location of pain send out sunday afternoon, the question is

Have (name of child) had any pain during the last week in

1. neck, back or low back

2. Shoulder, arm or hand

3. Hip, leg or foot

4. No my child has not had any pain

If the parent answered 1, 2 or 3 we called them called them monday, if the child still had pain, we performed a clinical examination during the next week.

Question number two was concerning leisure time sport during the last week, where the answers could be a number from 0-8, 8 meaning attending leisure time sport more than 7 times the last week.

Question number three, was only send if the answer to question number two was 1-8, asking what sports it was, answer possibilities 1-10, with 1-9 being the 9 most popular sports in the municipality and answer being 10 other sports. We have used it for nearly six years now, with more than 95% of the 1200 participating children answering every week.

The above has given us a highly accurate record of childhood injuries, the type of injuries and the exposures.

We have published some manuscripts, e.g.

Heidemann M, Jespersen E, Holst R, Schou AJ, Husby S, Mølgaard C, Wedderkopp

N. The impact on children's bone health of a school-based physical education

program and participation in leisure time sports: the Childhood Health, Activity

and Motor Performance School (the CHAMPS) study, Denmark. Prev Med. 2013

Aug;57(2):87-91. doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2013.04.015. Epub 2013 Apr 30. PubMed PMID:

23643934.

Jespersen E, Holst R, Franz C, Rexen CT, Wedderkopp N. Seasonal variation in

musculoskeletal extremity injuries in school children aged 6-12 followed

prospectively over 2.5 years: a cohort study. BMJ Open. 2014 Jan 8;4(1):e004165.

doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2013-004165. PubMed PMID: 24401728; PubMed Central PMCID:

PMC3902503.

Jespersen E, Rexen CT, Franz C, Møller NC, Froberg K, Wedderkopp N.

Musculoskeletal extremity injuries in a cohort of schoolchildren aged 6-12: A

2.5-year prospective study. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2014 Jan 29. doi:

10.1111/sms.12177. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 24472003.

Jespersen E, Holst R, Franz C, Rexen C, Klakk H, Wedderkopp N. Overuse and

traumatic musculoskeletal extremity injuries in school children. Br J Sports Med.

2014 Apr;48(7):611-2. doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2014-093494.140. PubMed PMID:

24620181.

Jespersen E, Holst R, Franz C, Rexen CT, Klakk H, Wedderkopp N. Overuse and

traumatic extremity injuries in schoolchildren surveyed with weekly text messages

over 2.5 years. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2013 Jun 26. doi: 10.1111/sms.12095.

[Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 23800031.

Trifonov Rexen C, Andersen LB, Ersbøll AK, Jespersen E, Franz C, Wedderkopp N.

Injuries in children with extra physical education in primary schools. Med Sci

Sports Exerc. 2014 Apr;46(4):745-52. doi: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000000152. PubMed

PMID: 24121246.

Hope this will answer some of your questions.

Best wishes

Niels

Dear Niels, thank you so much for your response, may be your papers applicable in doing my research, especially using SMS-track may be more benefits in my work.

Dear Alexis, many thanks for your explanations. As Dr. Stefan Hay earlier noted about the movisensXS website, I think the movisensXS is more applicable than Mindeval, because in movisensXS you can create your scales and sharing it with your subjects, but in Mindeval I could not found the same or applicable ways.

However, I dont know about how I can use shorted scales and in which way, yet, by these websites or using SMS. and how I can short some scales like BRE-Q.

Behzad,

we used Palm z22 (z is for zire, I think). We gave each participant one device to carry around for a week. I guess that the use of smartphones is easier (and less expensive), but it wasn't available at the time (not all participants had them...).

You write questions in notepad or similar, upload to the device. Then you program the device how many signals and at which intervals to emit... After the completion of the study, you connect device to the computer and download the data (in .txt format).

Hi Anic, thank you for you explanation.

I was wondering if you could give me more info about your kind of questions, I mean that in which range or what were your kind of questions, yes or no answers, or for instance range from 1 to 7 or in what?

Thank you in advance.

Behzad, we used EMA in conjunction with objective physical activity measures in a week-long observation of adults to assess associations between the executive functions and various aspects of activity.

For the EMA element we used the PRO-Diary by CamNTech, which is wrist-worn, has an audible alarm feature, and a number of response formats. The benefit of a wrist-worn device is that it can't be left lying around or forgotten about, therefore reducing data loss.

Something to consider.

Hi David,

Thank you for your response, you mentioned a great idea (wrist-worn device) and may be I create the same method in my researches.

I wanted to used smartphones, but the most limitation of this, is the lack of smartphones among all of subjects,

after that I have created a website for using this method and sharing the scales among subjects, but some of them may be do not answer upon finishing their programs and this may be the next problem or difficulties in my researches.

I am not sure about this, in which how I can control or solve this problem ?!

Any suggestion among participants in this question will be appreciate.

Best regards in advance.

Behzad,

Using smartphones in research is a great idea in theory, but is quite difficult in practice. Particularly because you require all participants to own the same make and model of phone (or at least the same background software/platform - which is unlikely to be the case). If you decide to buy the phones as research instruments so that all participants have the same platform, then you would be as well buying a device that is made specifically for research. The way I see it is that phones are ideal for big business and gathering market-type information, but are less useful for answering specific research questions unless you have considerable technical resources/support behind you (which I doubt you have).

Regards,

David

Dear David,

many thanks for your response again.

How is your solution about using website?

After finishing the subjects` programs, I think they may have not the feel right about when they were in exercise environments. and this may effect on the research results.!

best regards,

Dear Behzad,

the question of using smartphones in researc h is not as critical as discussed. We did this for many years, and with an appropriate tool, you dont need a technical background to run a study.

If you want to assess the behavioral regulations in exercise, the use of mobile devices ist mandatory if you want to do it as an EMA study. Did you have a look at the movisens XS tool to design such a study? And in the newest version of this platform, you are able to connect activity sensors to the smartphone via bluetooth to asses the activity and the subjective data in parallel and to be able to trigger the query on the smartphone by events registered by the activity sensor.

Dear Dr. Hey,

Thank you for your response.

I`ve looked at the movisens XS tool, and its give me great idea for making the same website in Persian.

Yes, using of mobile device is mandatory in an EMA study, for measuring BREQ,

but, when all of subjects do not access to smartphones, what is your solution in using websites, like movisens XS, and this is a limitation yet ! ?

For example, during the end of the competition season, I do not access to all subjects and, as well as all of them do not access to the smartphones, but, they can access to websites, but I think that it will be a limitation yet, due to they may be do not have a real feel about their situation. !?