Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

1291

Hillol Sarker

Date

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Computer Science

Committee Chair

Santosh Kumar

Committee Member

Vasile Rus

Committee Member

Ebenezer Olusegun George

Abstract

Self-report in the form of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) has been the primary instrument to collect measurements from participants in their natural environment. Given numerous sources of biases and inaccuracies in self-report, assessing and improving the reliability of self-report has been the subject of continuing research. However, to date, there exist only limited lab based methods to check the veracity of collected self-report data. Increasing adoption of sensors in field studies that sometimes can passively measure the same phenomena that have been traditionally included in EMA self-report has opened up a new opportunity to assess the reliability of self-reports.In this paper, we use data collected in a week-long field study with wearable sensors to first investigate whether lack of agreement between self-reported location and GPS-inferred location can be used to predict the reliability of self-reports. We find this not be the case, primarily because lack of agreement on location results from sensitivity of some participants to reporting locations and it does not indicate lack of care in completing self-reports. We then investigate whether contexts of the participants, such as place (from GPS), activity level (inferred from accelerometers), or stress (inferred from physiological sensors) are associated with low reliability. We find that not being at home or work does not predict reliability of self-report, nor does the context when participants are engaged in physical activity at the time of receiving the self-report prompts. However, we do find that if the participants are stressed at the time of receiving a self-report prompt, then reliability of self-reported data is low. This implies that unless demanded by the study protocol, self-report prompts should be avoided when participants are under stress.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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