Abstract
Retrospective self-reports have been commonly used to assess psychological variables such as feelings, thoughts, or emotions. Nevertheless, this method presents serious limitations to gather accurate information about variables that change over time. The Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) approach has been used to deal with some of the limitations these retrospective assessment methods present, and for gathering real-time information about dynamic psychological variables, such as feelings, thoughts, or behaviors. In the sports injury rehabilitation context, athletes' thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and pain perceptions during the rehabilitation process can influence the outcomes of this process. These responses change over different stages of the rehabilitation and taking them into account can help therapists to adapt the rehabilitation process and increasing their effectiveness. With this aim, an EMA mobile app (PSIXPORT) was designed to gather real-time information about severely injured athletes' cognitive appraisals, emotional responses, behaviors, and pain perceptions during their rehabilitation process. The goals of this study were to evaluate Psixport's ability to gather real-time information about injured athletes' psychological responses during the rehabilitation, to test the users' perceived usability of Psixport, and to compare the reliability and differences between real-time data gathered with Psixport and the data gathered through the one-time retrospective method. Twenty-eight severely injured athletes (10 men and 18 women) were assessed using Psixport, a retrospective questionnaire, and the uMARS usability test. Results showed that Psixport can be considered as a good tool to gather information about injured athletes' cognitive appraisals, emotional responses, behaviors, and pain perceptions. Moreover, multiple data assessments gathered with the app showed to be more accurate information about injured athletes' psychological responses than one-time retrospective reports.
Highlights
Assessing coping strategies from subjects that went through a stressful event involves gathering information about individuals’ inner events, such as thoughts or mental images, which can be only provided by the participant (Smith et al, 1999)
That is because authors such as Reis and Wheeler (1991) asserted that gathering information by multiple assessments across time based on diary methodologies could provide more accurate information than one-time retrospective reports
The total number of evaluations gathered with Psixport was 621 from 1,116 possible, which sets the compliance ratio at 55.7%
Summary
Assessing coping strategies from subjects that went through a stressful event involves gathering information about individuals’ inner events, such as thoughts or mental images, which can be only provided by the participant (Smith et al, 1999). Lack of clear recall of subjects’ own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors triggered by or related to those stressful events, could bring participants to base their retrospective reports on the way they generally cope with this type of events (Schwarz and Sudman, 1994; Smith et al, 1999) regardless what they truly feel, though, or behave. Ecological Momentary Assessment approach, compared to retrospective methods, provides multiple advantages such as collecting real-time information about subjects’ habits and behaviors from their context (Hicks et al, 2010) or allowing to explore antecedents and consequences after individuals’ behaviors appearance (Sala et al, 2017). An EMA approach deals with some of the limitations of traditional retrospective methods’ such as inaccurate subjects’ retrospective answers due to their autobiographical memory biases (Schwarz, 2007)
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