2 - Microbehavioral approaches to monitoring human experience

Summary

Social science typically studies individual behavior in isolation from the natural temporal context in which it occurs. Survey questions ask people to compress their actual experiences by indicating whether they ‘often’ or ‘usually’ do something or feel a certain way, rather than examining these experiences as they occur in daily life. Studies of the actual use of time provide an opportunity to study human experience in ‘real time’, i.e., as individuals are actually involved in daily behavior. This is especially important in identifying and understanding the life experiences of people who undergo periods of stress or mental dysfunction. How do their life experiences in such periods differ from those under more ‘normal’ conditions and from those of people who do not experience such severe stress or dysfunction?

The most common technique for the study of time use patterns is the ‘time diary’, a prime example of the ‘microbehavioral’ approach to survey research. Recognizing the limited ability of respondents to report complex behavior in a survey context requires questions to be limited to elementary experiences. A microbehavioral approach asks about the details of a recent unhappy episode at work or in marriage, rather than posing a global question on job or marital dissatisfaction; it asks for accounts of activities that happened yesterday, not in general or typically, or it combines direct questions about a respondent's specific information on a topic with questions about his or her specific mass media usage over a short time period, rather than expecting a meaningful response to a simple question about ‘main sources’ of information.