Compare methods

	Ecological Momentary Assessment (Disability)	Single-Case Experimental Design
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	2013
Originator	Arthur A. Stone & Saul Shiffman	Thomas R. Kratochwill and the What Works Clearinghouse single-case design panel
Type	Repeated real-time, in-context sampling pipeline for disability-relevant experience	Within-subject experimental pipeline for evaluating interventions on individuals
Seminal source	Stone, A. A., & Shiffman, S. (1994). Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in behavioral medicine. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 16(3), 199-202.	Kratochwill, T. R., Hitchcock, J. H., Horner, R. H., Levin, J. R., Odom, S. L., Rindskopf, D. M., & Shadish, W. R. (2013). Single-case intervention research design standards. Remedial and Special Education, 34(1), 26-38.
Aliases	EMA (Disability), Experience Sampling in Disability, Real-Time Momentary Sampling, Ambulatory Assessment of Disability Experience	Single-Subject Experimental Design, N-of-1 Experimental Design, Single-Case Research Design, SCED
Related	2	3
Summary	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.	Single-case experimental design (SCED) is a family of rigorous within-subject experimental methodologies for evaluating whether an intervention causes change in an individual, widely used in rehabilitation, special education, and applied behavior analysis. Rather than averaging across a large sample, SCED measures a defined target behavior repeatedly across a baseline (A) phase and an intervention (B) phase, and infers a causal effect when the change is replicated at three or more different points in time within the same case. Internal validity is built into the design itself through systematic manipulation of the independent variable and repeated demonstrations of effect, not through a control group. The 2013 What Works Clearinghouse single-case design standards, formalized by Kratochwill and colleagues, codified what counts as a credible SCED, including requirements for systematic manipulation, at least three attempts to demonstrate an effect, and minimum data points per phase. SCED is the experimental backbone of evidence-based practice for individuals whose conditions, contexts, or low incidence make group designs impractical.