Smartphones and wearables have made in-vivo assessment of stress, coping, and emotion via intensive longitudinal designs (ILDs) especially appealing. In this chapter, we briefly address the usefulness of adding an ILD framework to the coping researcher’s toolbox in the quest to gain a comprehensive and developmentally informed understanding of adolescent coping. Their importance rests on the ability of ILDs to capture coping microprocesses. Next, we draw on data to answer a pertinent question related to popular approaches to assessing coping via ILD: whether delivering ILD surveys via phone calls or text messages to adolescents reveals differences in compliance and data quality. We follow this with a discussion of several challenges associated with implementing ILDs, including types of coping questions these methods are less well-suited to address. We highlight the need to match theory to methods, and the need for a priori consideration of analytic approaches. This section further points to useful published resources for making optimal use of ILDs in developmental coping research, as well as describes novel passive sensing methods and physiological measurement approaches available via smartphones and wearables. We conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of how ILDs complement traditional longitudinal examinations of coping development.

Successful aging is a multidimensional construct that has been used by a variety of clinical and empirical disciplines to describe physical and psychological well-being among the elderly. While biomedical models of successful aging rely on fixed criteria related to health and disability status, psychological models emphasize dynamic processes that promote life satisfaction in the face of age-related declines. Psychological models have proposed individual traits that are associated with successful aging processes, including those related to coping with, adapting to, and compensating for age-related challenges (e.g., tenacious goal pursuit, flexibility, etc.). Grit is a noncognitive trait that may promote coping and compensation but has been relatively unexamined in relation to successful aging. The ability to adapt to age-related losses, such as physical disability and cognitive decline, may represent a previously unexplored facet of grit that is specific to older adults. Preserved cognitive functioning is an important component of successful aging that may be promoted by grit and the use of compensatory strategies. In the context of atypical cognitive decline, however, grit may fail to promote effective compensation and may instead result in the use of unsuccessful strategies or “costly perseverance.”