Ecological Momentary Assessment (Disability)

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.