Idiographic & Within-Person Measurement
ActivePerson-specific measurement using ecological momentary assessment and intensive longitudinal designs — studying how distress and personality states fluctuate within individuals over time, and whether measures built on group averages hold at the individual level.
Most psychological measures are validated on group averages, then applied to individuals — an assumption of ergodicity that often fails. This program uses ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and intensive longitudinal designs to study people one at a time: sampling distress, mood, and personality states many times a day over weeks to capture how they actually move within a person.
Student research teams and honours projects in this strand have tested whether the DASS-21’s three-factor structure survives at the within-person level, derived individual-level reliable-change statistics for depression, anxiety, and stress, examined how trait personality predicts the mean and stability of momentary states, modelled state dynamics underlying academic performance, and begun developing parallel forms and network-based tools (including with large language models) for repeated, transdiagnostic measurement of distress. The common aim is measurement that respects individual variability rather than averaging it away.