Using Experience Sampling Methods to Study Identity Dynamics: A 5-Step Guide

A dynamic perspective on identity is essential for explaining how identities emerge, stabilize, and change across everyday situations. Mounting theory and evidence show that identity varies meaningfully from moment to moment. Experience sampling methods (ESM), a data collection method in which participants repeatedly provide researchers with information about their current or recent thoughts, behaviors, feelings, and contexts as they happen in real time, is facilitating identification and documentation of intra-individual identity dynamics and the inter-individual differences in those dynamics. This paper provides a five-step practical guide to ESM—full flow from theoretical specification to study design, data collection, data analysis, and results presentation and interpretation—that may be helpful for identity scholars seeking to integrate ESM in their work. In presenting each step, we outline the core goals and decisions involved and provide an illustrative example, describing how specific design decisions were made in a small empirical study of how ethnic-racial and gender identity change across social situations and how the resulting specifics and empirical results might be reported in a journal manuscript. Together with accompanying R code implementations, this guide expands identity researchers’ toolbox and the exploration and study of intra-individual identity dynamics.