Prof. Dr. Markus Bühner von der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München [Link zum Profil] kommt für eine LIfBi Lecture in die Wilhelmspost.

Abstract

Psychology as the science of human experience and behavior has rather neglected the latter component for decades. Psychological researchers have long recognized the importance of studying everyday human behavior. However, the collection of extensive behavioral data is very expensive and complex, which is why it has so far often been limited to controlled studies in the laboratory. But with the increasing digitalization of our everyday lives, technical devices such as smartphones are opening up new avenues in psychological research. Smartphones have become ubiquitous, portable supercomputers that offer many functions that go beyond traditional functionalities, such as making phone calls or writing text messages. Their embedded sensor technology can collect naturalistic usage data from the background in an unobtrusive way. Accordingly, smartphones have become increasingly popular as research tools for collecting data on behavior and situation in everyday life through special research applications that are distributed to the smartphones of the participants.
In my talk, I will illustrate this new branch of research by presenting an Android app called PhoneStudy which we have continuously been developing at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, as part of an ongoing interdisciplinary project (https://phonestudy.org). Since 2013 we have completed several empirical sensing studies with several thousand participants. For example, we applied our PhoneStudy app in panel studies to combine traditional self-report questionnaires and ambulatory assessments (sensing and experience sampling) to investigate personality and well-being in everyday contexts. To illustrate the great variety of smartphone sensing data and the resulting possibilities for psychological research, I will give an overview of our current research projects.