Concept, Possibilities and Pilot-Testing of a New Smartphone Application for the Social and Life Sciences to Study Human Behavior Including Validation Data from Personality Psychology

Christian Montag, Harald Baumeister, Christopher Kannen, Rayna Sariyska, Eva-Maria Meßner and Matthias Brand
Additional contact information
Christian Montag: Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, 89081 Ulm, Germany
Harald Baumeister: Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, 89081 Ulm, Germany
Christopher Kannen: Independent Researcher
Rayna Sariyska: Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, 89081 Ulm, Germany
Eva-Maria Meßner: Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, 89081 Ulm, Germany
Matthias Brand: General Psychology: Cognition and Center for Behavioral Addiction Research (CeBAR), University of Duisburg-Essen, 47048 Duisburg, Germany

J, 2019, vol. 2, issue 2, 1-14

Abstract: With the advent of the World Wide Web, the smartphone and the Internet of Things, not only society but also the sciences are rapidly changing. In particular, the social sciences can profit from these digital developments, because now scientists have the power to study real-life human behavior via smartphones and other devices connected to the Internet of Things on a large-scale level. Although this sounds easy, scientists often face the problem that no practicable solution exists to participate in such a new scientific movement, due to a lack of an interdisciplinary network. If so, the development time of a new product, such as a smartphone application to get insights into human behavior takes an enormous amount of time and resources. Given this problem, the present work presents an easy way to use a smartphone application, which can be applied by social scientists to study a large range of scientific questions. The application provides measurements of variables via tracking smartphone–use patterns, such as call behavior, application use (e.g., social media), GPS and many others. In addition, the presented Android-based smartphone application, called Insights , can also be used to administer self-report questionnaires for conducting experience sampling and to search for co-variations between smartphone usage/smartphone data and self-report data. Of importance, the present work gives a detailed overview on how to conduct a study using an application such as Insights , starting from designing the study, installing the application to analyzing the data. In the present work, server requirements and privacy issues are also discussed. Furthermore, first validation data from personality psychology are presented. Such validation data are important in establishing trust in the applied technology to track behavior. In sum, the aim of the present work is (i) to provide interested scientists a short overview on how to conduct a study with smartphone app tracking technology, (ii) to present the features of the designed smartphone application and (iii) to demonstrate its validity with a proof of concept study, hence correlating smartphone usage with personality measures.

Keywords: smartphone use; digital phenotyping; mobile sensing; psychoinformatics; personality; psychology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 I10 I12 I13 I14 I18 I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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