Special Issue "Capturing Life and Its Fluctuations: Experience Sampling and Daily Diary Studies in Studying Within-Person Variability“; Guest Editors: Marta Roczniewska, Ewelina Smoktunowicz and Ewa Gruszczyńska [Vol. 15 No. 2 (2020)]
Given recent technological advances (e.g. online surveys, smartphones, fitness trackers), the possibilities for studying experiential, physiological, and behavioral processes in the social sciences have become much easier. These advancements allow for multiple measurements on the individual level and a focus on within-person differences, rather than between-person differences. Such data contain a wealth of information about the dynamics and processes as they unfold over time.
These daily fluctuations of psychological phenomena can be studied using intensive longitudinal methods. The number of studies based on intensive longitudinal data, including experience sampling or daily diaries, has been substantially increasing in recent years. This comes to demonstrate that these designs allow new research questions to be addressed, as well as old ones to be revisited. The aim of this Special Issue is to point towards the opportunities that these methods provide and to showcase examples of diary studies conducted across distinct subdisciplines of social psychology.