Traditional surveys have some big limitations 🚫.
🔊 They can be "NOISY," meaning that people's current context can disproportionately impact their global evaluations. For example, a person might enjoy their job. Still, if you ask them how satisfied they are after a long and unproductive meeting, their answer will typically be negatively biased.
📸 They're "STATIC." Traditional surveys miss the ups and downs. For instance, a person may have occasional but particularly intense moments of stress, which a one-off survey will almost invariably miss. Yet, the intensity of one's stress spikes could be what drives them to quit their job or engage in dangerous behaviors.
❓They lack CONTEXT. It's not just about knowing someone is dissatisfied with their job; it's about knowing when. If we knew that an employee felt the worst during their weekly inventory count, we could address that task rather than mistakenly assuming they dislike every aspect of their job.
Introducing Experience Sampling 🎯: An innovative approach that uses apps to send short questions at random times, capturing real-time thoughts, feelings, and behavior. It's like if you texted a friend throughout the day to see how they're doing instead of just calling once a year.
Experience sampling cuts through the noise, captures the ups and downs, and adds the context missing in traditional surveys. It gives us the full movie of someone's experiences, not just a single snapshot.