Compare methods

	Activity Diary (Disability)	Ecological Momentary Assessment (Disability)	Goal Attainment Scaling
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	1994	1968
Originator	Time-use diary tradition adapted to disability research; ICF framework by the WHO	Arthur A. Stone & Saul Shiffman	Thomas J. Kiresuk & Robert E. Sherman
Type	Time-use / activity diary pipeline for daily participation in disability research	Repeated real-time, in-context sampling pipeline for disability-relevant experience	Individualized, criterion-referenced outcome measurement procedure
Seminal source	Stone, A. A., & Shiffman, S. (1994). Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in behavioral medicine. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 16(3), 199-202.	Stone, A. A., & Shiffman, S. (1994). Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in behavioral medicine. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 16(3), 199-202.	Kiresuk, T. J., & Sherman, R. E. (1968). Goal attainment scaling: A general method for evaluating comprehensive community mental health programs. Community Mental Health Journal, 4(6), 443–453.
Aliases	Time-Use Diary (Disability), Daily Activity Log, Participation Diary, 24-Hour Activity Recall Diary	EMA (Disability), Experience Sampling in Disability, Real-Time Momentary Sampling, Ambulatory Assessment of Disability Experience	GAS, Goal Attainment Scale, Kiresuk-Sherman Goal Attainment Scaling, Individualized Goal Scaling
Related	2	2	3
Summary	An activity diary, or time-use diary, is a structured record in which a person logs the activities they do across a day, how long each takes, and the context in which it happens; in disability research the method is adapted to capture daily activity participation, time allocation, the assistance people use, and the barriers they encounter. Diaries may cover a full 24-hour day in sequential slots or sample episodes throughout the day, and they record not only what the person did but where, with whom, with what human or device assistance, and against what obstacles. Aggregating these records yields indicators of how time is spent and how fully a person participates in life domains, which can be mapped onto the Activities and Participation component of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). By grounding measurement in concrete daily activity and environmental context, activity diaries complement momentary and clinical measures and reveal the lived texture of participation that summary functional scores miss.	Ecological momentary assessment (EMA), introduced to behavioral medicine by Stone and Shiffman in 1994, is a method of repeatedly sampling people's experiences in real time and in their natural environments rather than relying on retrospective questionnaires. Applied to disability research, EMA captures momentary, disability-relevant states — pain, fatigue, mood, symptom interference, and participation in daily activities — as they occur, typically through prompts delivered on a smartphone many times a day. By measuring experience in the moment and in context, EMA reduces the recall bias that distorts global retrospective reports and exposes the within-person variability and momentary person-environment interactions that aggregate scores hide. Prompts may be signal-contingent (delivered at random or scheduled times), event-contingent (triggered when a defined event occurs), or interval-contingent (at fixed intervals), and the resulting intensive longitudinal data are analyzed with multilevel models that separate within-person dynamics from between-person differences. EMA has become a cornerstone for studying how disability is actually lived day to day.	Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) is a method for measuring the outcomes of an individualized intervention by writing, in advance, a small set of client-specific goals and defining for each a graded scale of possible outcomes from much worse than expected to much better than expected. After the intervention, the actual outcome on each goal is scored on this scale and the scores are combined into a single standardized index, allowing idiosyncratic, personally meaningful goals to be aggregated and compared across clients and programs. It was introduced by Thomas Kiresuk and Robert Sherman in 1968 to evaluate community mental health programs.