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. 2024 Oct;56(7):7691-7706.
doi: 10.3758/s13428-024-02445-w. Epub 2024 Jun 24.

SEMA3: A free smartphone platform for daily life surveys

Sarah T O'Brien  1 , Nerisa Dozo  1 , Jordan D X Hinton  2   3 , Ella K Moeck  1   4 , Rio Susanto  5 , Glenn T Jayaputera  5 , Richard O Sinnott  5 , Duy Vu  5 , Mario Alvarez-Jimenez  6   7 , John Gleeson  8 , Peter Koval  9
Affiliations

SEMA3: A free smartphone platform for daily life surveys

Sarah T O'Brien et al. Behav Res Methods. 2024 Oct.

Abstract

Traditionally, behavioral, social, and health science researchers have relied on global/retrospective survey methods administered cross-sectionally (i.e., on a single occasion) or longitudinally (i.e., on several occasions separated by weeks, months, or years). More recently, social and health scientists have added daily life survey methods (also known as intensive longitudinal methods or ambulatory assessment) to their toolkit. These methods (e.g., daily diaries, experience sampling, ecological momentary assessment) involve dense repeated assessments in everyday settings. To facilitate research using daily life survey methods, we present SEMA3 ( http://www.SEMA3.com ), a platform for designing and administering intensive longitudinal daily life surveys via Android and iOS smartphones. SEMA3 fills an important gap by providing researchers with a free, intuitive, and flexible platform with basic and advanced functionality. In this article, we describe SEMA3's development history and system architecture, provide an overview of how to design a study using SEMA3 and outline its key features, and discuss the platform's limitations and propose directions for future development of SEMA3.

Keywords: Ambulatory assessment; Daily diary method; Daily life; Ecological momentary assessment (EMA); Experience sampling method (ESM); Intensive longitudinal methods; Smartphone surveys.

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Conflict of interest statement

Not applicable.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Total publications including daily life survey methods as a percentage of total publications across all fields from 1980–2022. Note. Publications including the terms “experience sampling”, “ecological momentary assessment”, “electronic diary” or “ambulatory assessment” in their title or abstract, from 1980 to 2022, as a percentage of total publications across all fields with no key words filtered, indexed by Dimensions https://www.dimensions.ai/. A percentage was used to indicate that these methods have increased in popularity above and beyond the increase in total scientific output. This plot is not cumulative.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Overview of SEMA3 system architecture
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Workflow for researchers to run a study using SEMA3
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
SEMA3 researcher portal - Participants tab
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Structure of an example SEMA3 study
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
SEMA3 researcher portal dashboard
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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