Developed to help answer psychological research questions, the Mind Window app has allowed nearly 6,000 participants to share real-world data about their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Skills used:
- Coding & Software Development
- Project Management
- Database Integration & SQL
- Python
Although gathering data in a lab setting helps provide psychological researchers with a great deal of control, it is inherently an artificial environment. This fact becomes clearly influential when we try to ask questions about the naturalistic experiences that all of us have in our everyday lives. To help answer those types of questions, experience sampling has become a way of having participants provide rich psychological and behavioral data while trying to maintain the ‘everyday’ validity that lab-based experiments struggle with.
Mind Window was developed to help gather aspects of these data spontaneously and from within real-world circumstances. I developed it using the React Native framework so that it could be easily deployed on both iOS and Android devices. This is an important consideration as one intention was to collect data from a wide range of demographics – meaning that compatibility and access had to be a prominent feature.
One difficulty with gathering longitudinal data (that is, over time) is that participants will only respond to prompts infrequently and stop responding after a short period of time. A method to counteract this is to pay participants but this is, literally, a costly method and can inspire participants to respond in ingenuous ways. With Mind Window, I tried to provide an internal incentive by allowing participants to customize their experience through a custom background image, a selected ‘assistant’, and by providing some statistics about their overall responses. Some Mind Window participants have used the app for over a year so some of these efforts appear to be effective.
Another consideration, when performing experience sampling, is data integrity. Fast and reliable data transfer and storage is a necessity. For that reason, I selected Google’s Firebase platform. Firebase allows for mobile and web-based applications to use the Firestore NoSQL backend that provides lightning-fast read/writes as well as the ability to queue data to be synced later when users lack a data connection. A SQL database copy is maintained so that traditional queries can be used when trying to quickly subset the data or to answer spontaneous questions.
The Mind Window project allowed me to leverage my programming and database systems experience to create a tool that has collected nearly a million points of data from nearly 6,000 participants ages 18 to 86 and with diverse demographics. The data are being used in a variety of studies to help answer questions about how we think in everyday life and how those thoughts relate to other measures.