Intensive Longitudinal Methods: An Introduction to Diary and Experience Sampling Research

Psychologists Bolger (Columbia U.) and Laurenceau (U. of Delaware) define an intensive longitudinal study as one with enough repeated measurements to model a distinctive change process for each individual. They explore how to use these methods to understand people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in situ as a contrast and complement to traditional laboratory experiments. Also complementing the wide-ranging Handbook of Research Methods for Studying Daily Life (Mehl and Conner, 2012), they focus narrowly and deeply on research design and data analysis. The goal is to provide researchers a practical how-to book written by other researchers. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
This book offers a complete, practical guide to doing an intensive longitudinal study with individuals, dyads, or groups. It provides the tools for studying social, psychological, and physiological processes in everyday contexts, using methods such as diary and experience sampling. A range of engaging, worked-through research examples with datasets are featured. Coverage includes how to: select the best intensive longitudinal design for a particular research question, apply multilevel models to within-subject designs, model within-subject change processes for continuous and categorical outcomes, assess the reliability of within-subject changes, assure sufficient statistical power, and more. Several end-of-chapter write-ups illustrate effective ways to present study findings for publication. Datasets and output in SPSS, SAS, Mplus, HLM, MLwiN, and R for the examples are available on the companion website (www.intensivelongitudinal.com).