Abstract
Ambulatory assessment (AA) is a research method that aims to collect longitudinal biopsychosocial data in groups of individuals. AA studies are commonly conducted via mobile devices such as smartphones. Researchers tend to communicate their AA protocols to the community in natural language by describing step-by-step procedures operating on a set of materials. However, natural language requires effort to transcribe onto and from the software systems used for data collection, and may be ambiguous, thereby making it harder to reproduce a study. Though AA protocols may also be written as code in a programming language, most programming languages are not easily read by most researchers. Thus, the quality of scientific discourse on AA stands to gain from protocol descriptions that are easy to read, yet remain formal and readily executable by computers. This paper makes the case for using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to achieve this. While HTML can suitably describe AA materials, it cannot describe AA procedures. To resolve this, and taking away lessons from previous efforts with protocol implementations in a system called TEMPEST, we offer a set of custom HTML5 elements that help treat HTML documents as executable programs that can both render AA materials, and effect AA procedures on computational platforms.
Highlights
Scientists in the social and medical sciences use intensive longitudinal methods (ILM) (Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013) for the repetitive sampling of individuals in the context of their daily lives and routines over extended periods of time
With Custom Web Components, we provide a set of custom HyperText Markup Language (HTML) elements that represent content commonly found in Ambulatory assessment (AA) questionnaires, such as multiple-choice items, sliders, text-fields, with several configurable options
The fact that not everything is instantiated at the beginning as it happens with regular HTML content is important
Summary
A protocol is the plan for collecting data (Vogt & Johnson, 2011). In the context of a specific method, such as AA, the protocol includes two components: (1) detailed definitions of the materials (e.g., the instruments to be used), and (2) instructions on how the data collection procedures are to take place (e.g., detailed descriptions of how the instruments are deployed). Turnkey systems can make up for some of the disadvantages of homebrew collections in automating the data collection and in managing the entire study life-cycle They offer the advantage that researchers do not need to be concerned with implementation-specific and presentation-specific tasks, as the system developers have already made those choices, and they automate the generation of materials and the execution of the study. They do so by ensuring consistency of materials between the different processes, without requiring manual transformations to be performed in-between. We present an alternative, including a brief overview of the work from which it was developed
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